The Third World War: The Untold Story

Chapter 3: The State of the Alliance

The resolve and the military capability of the West had since 1918 been sapped by an uncritical hankering for peace. It was hardly surprising that after the war of 1914-18, in which the full potential of highly developed industrial nations was for the first time totally applied to the destruction of national enemies, a deep and widespread revulsion against war set in. The tide of pacifism in the 1930s, particularly in war-scarred Europe, was running strongly, fed by a genuine emotional concern which often blinded quite sensible people to what should have been obvious. Some strange aberrations resulted. At a time when Hitler’s long march in Europe had already begun, for example, the annual Labour Party Conference in Great Britain voted not for the reduction of the Royal Air Force but for its total abolition.

On the other side, the nature and the purposes of peace were seen rather differently. ‘Peace,’ said Lenin, ‘as an ultimate objective simply means communist world control.’ The policy of the USSR, both internally and externally, from the end of the First World War to the outbreak of the Third, was not only wholly consistent with this principle. It was consistent with no other. The Third World War was its inevitable consequence.

There were, of course, plenty of Marxists around, in the West as well as the East, to whom Lenin’s dictum would be no more than an axiom. There were also Western artists, writers and other intellectuals in the 1930s who enthusiastically embraced communism, since it seemed to offer to suffering humanity real hope for a better world. Some of them claimed later that they had been misled as to the true nature of communism and its methods. This was a claim received on the whole with scepticism.

There were also many honest folk who were simply sickened by the very thought of war, with its savage and appalling slaughter and its apparently mindless cruelty. Among them those whom Lenin described as ‘useful fools’, and found so helpful for the purposes he had in mind, occurred in some numbers. In free and generous societies they flourish in abundance.

After the Second World War, which was in some ways little more than a continuance of the First, a new and dreadful danger appeared in the weapons of mass destruction which men had been clever enough to invent, and to manufacture, but which mankind was neither wise enough nor good enough to be trusted with.

It was Soviet policy to move in and exploit, to the advantage of the USSR, fears found everywhere of nuclear annihilation. The so-called ‘peace movements’ of the Western world were one result, unobtrusively orchestrated and largely paid for by the USSR, with maximum utilization of Lenin’s ‘useful fools’, who were often men of impeccable respectability and even occasionally of some distinction. Peace movements flourished in the fifties. This was the time of the Stockholm Appeal and the World Peace Council and other manifestations that were discreetly directed from Moscow and generously financed through the so-called Peace Fund. The principal target of all such peace offensives was the United States of America.

It is hard nowadays, when so much is known of the manoeuvres of the deeply dishonest regime under which the Soviet Union suffered for more than half a century, to believe that people in other lands not under its imperial dominion could be so foolish. The Soviet Union had, since the end of the Second World War, annexed and enslaved three free nations on the Baltic coast (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia); bound two other nations (Belorussia and the Ukraine) in unwilling servitude; continued to massacre its own people to maintain the supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU); imposed harsh and unwelcome regimes by force in Eastern Europe; financed and organized subversion in democratic countries which, though ripe for the plucking, were too far from its frontiers to invade; built a wall across part of Europe, with mines and guns and dogs, not to keep miscreants out but unwilling citizens in; invaded Afghanistan; behaved towards the inhabitants of the Soviet Union with a savagery which passes description; lied and tricked and cheated wherever it found advantage in dishonesty… and yet, so great were Western fears of nuclear war that, adroitly handled, these fears could be turned to suspicion and dislike of a nation whose leaders were the elected choice of the people, with no history of the massacre of millions behind them, still less of the enslavement of nations — the United States. It would be foolish to claim that there are no weaknesses in Western democracy. Ugly faults abound on every side, sometimes so monstrous as nearly to drive sensitive and intelligent observers to despair. But it was the height of absurdity to suggest that, whatever the weaknesses of the parliamentary democracies of the West, the grim, implacable, repressive incompetence of a Marxist tyranny would be preferable, that the policies of the Soviet Union were the only real source of world peace and that the only real threat to it lay in those of the United States. Yet this was the message put across by Soviet propaganda and spread by its agents, whether they knew what they were doing or not.

The 1980s opened to a swift crescendo in the orchestration of anti-nuclear protest. Mass rallies were organized in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, and the United States, in every one of which it was America that was cast as the villain of the piece. ‘Reduce the arsenal of the warmongering West,’ was the cry, ‘and give the peace-loving Soviet Union and its devoted associates the opportunity and the example to reduce their own.’ There were, it can be confidently asserted, no such demonstrations at all in the cities of the USSR.

The adroitness with which Lenin’s useful fools were exploited, and the degree to which the genuine fears of honest people were turned, in the Soviet interest, to the obstruction of their own governments was almost unbelievable. Eventually, common sense began to win back ground abandoned to hysteria. The hollowness of the unilateral nuclear disarmers’ arguments showed up ever more clearly and the gross travesty of truth which laid the blame for increasing armaments, particularly in the nuclear field, solely upon the United States was less uncritically accepted. By the summer of 1983 the scene was calmer, and though much damage had been done this was not irreparable. The Soviet Union’s peace offensive did not, in the end, cripple Western defensive efforts as completely as those who mounted it had hoped.

It must also be said that the public disquiet aroused by the growth of nuclear arsenals at the disposal of both superpowers did something, on the Western side at least, to alert governments to the necessity to explain fully to their own publics what was being done and why, instead of simply assuming that they could pursue these dramatic defence policies without any questions being asked. In the Soviet Union, of course, the problem never arose.

In addition to the general malaise which it created, nuclear policy was one of the causes of disunity between the Western allies, but by no means the only one. Another was something as vague as the difference in style between the actions of government on the two sides of the Atlantic. The uncertainty and soft centre of the Democratic presidency gave way in a single election to the hard-line and defiantly stated policies of a Republican era, even though there was still a marked lack of consistency between the policies announced from one day to the next. Neither style was attractive to the European leaders, with the partial exception of Britain’s Prime Minister. They preferred on the whole a more patient and consistent approach to policy-making, weighing one thing with another and often having to agree on more balanced and less adventurous policies than some of them would have liked, as the price for reaching agreement within the European Community. The latter as an instrument of policy in the world had never recovered the ground lost in the failure of the European Defence Community and the European Political Community in 1954. Much time had subsequently been wasted in trying to re-create institutions which would have replaced these brave efforts at the formation of a United States of Europe. The nationalist obsession of General de Gaulle, followed by the less blatant but equally damaging half-heartedness of Britain with regard to any positive move towards a new structure for Europe, had led to the spending of more time in the Community on what can literally be described as bread and butter issues than on the discussion of how Europe could wield a degree of influence in the world commensurate with its economic strength and the importance of its worldwide interests.

It was not until 1981 that the Genscher-Colombo proposal, supported behind the scenes by the Action Committees for the Union of Europe, showed the way to a new mechanism and a new act of political will. By adopting this proposal in 1983 the members of the Community, soon to be increased by the adherence of Spain and Portugal, equipped themselves with a capability for making decisions and an embryonic apparatus for putting them into effect. The great merit of this proposal lay in accepting things more or less as they stood, namely that the European Council, consisting of the heads of government of the member states of the Community, had set itself up as the top decision-making body both for matters within the normal operations of the Community and, more important for our present purpose, for the making of decisions in matters of foreign policy jointly between the governments of the member states. And now it had finally succeeded in adding to its tasks the search for identity of view in defence policy and co-operation between the armed forces of the Community’s members.

This was achieved through two kinds of measures, both of which seemed quite simple when they had been done but to get them done had required a leap of the imagination over the institutional hurdles which the theorists of the Community had placed in the way of any such pragmatic development. The European Council made an Act of Union declaring that it constituted a unified authority for whatever purposes it might choose then or later. It also decided to set up new secretariats for the preparation and execution of decisions in the fields of foreign policy and defence. Foreign policy had previously been co-ordinated, and so far as possible harmonized, by means of an impermanent bureaucracy consisting of the officials of the state which was furnishing the presidency of the Community at the time. As this changed every six months, continuity was difficult to ensure and efficiency suffered.

It was clear as soon as the decision to include defence matters in the activities of the Union had been taken that such an arrangement was totally inadequate. Defence decisions have either to be taken a long time in advance, owing to the time needed for the working out of operational doctrine upon which requirements for military equipment are based and then the long lead-times in its production, or alternatively have to be taken under heavy pressures in a very short time in some emergency or crisis requiring common action. A basic minimum of staff is required both to monitor the long-term processes and to prepare the data and intelligence material (for example, information on force dispositions) necessary for the taking of emergency decisions within the Alliance and for crisis management. The logic of this argument was in the end enough to overcome French hesitations, while Britain finally accepted that in order to maintain the levels of defence which the Conservative Government judged necessary, without offending its monetarist principles, some radical means of obtaining greater cost-effectiveness must be sought. The only available route to this objective lay through co-operation with the other states of Western Europe both in the production of armaments in common, with a far higher degree of standardization, and by the acceptance of a certain degree of specialization in the roles of the armed forces of member states. No dramatically swift results could be expected from this new institutional arrangement but at least it provided a framework in which improved and better shared planning could take place, once the essential decision had been taken to improve the conventional strength of the European forces in the Alliance in the circumstances which will be described below.

In addition to the disunity within the European Community, there had been a continuing rumble of disagreement between Europe and the United States over the roles that they should respectively or together play in protecting their interests throughout the world. These differences had been expressed with particular sharpness over the subjects of nuclear policy and the Middle East. The nuclear argument was frustrating to the Americans since they had believed that in the production and deployment in Western Europe of modernized long-range theatre nuclear forces (TNF) they were acceding to the wishes of the Europeans, who felt themselves threatened by the installation in the territory of the Soviet Union of improved systems obviously targeted on Western Europe. The resolution of this particular and vital difference of opinion was at least partially achieved by the opening of serious negotiations with the Soviet Union in late 1981 followed by the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) which are described in the next chapter; partly also by a reassessment of the proper role of the European defence effort within the Atlantic Alliance, which is more immediately germane to what follows. While it was perfectly right and proper that the Europeans should wish to have on their territory nuclear missiles equivalent to those facing them from the other side, or to try to negotiate for the abolition or reduction of such weapons on both sides, the acceptance of this did not begin to deal with one of the cruellest dilemmas with which Western statesmen might find themselves faced: namely the choice whether to be the first to use nuclear weapons if they were unable to hold off attack by conventional Soviet forces in Europe.

The new TNF were logically required as part of the general scheme of deterrence which had worked so well ever since the acquisition of a nuclear capability by the Soviet Union, on the general principle that like can only be deterred by like. The popular agitation against the stationing of these weapons in the territories of Western European states was therefore misconceived, as was apparently perceived by the great majority in those countries who did not accept that the example of unilateral disarmament given by the West would be followed by the East. The raising of this issue in the public debate led at last, however, to the focusing of attention on the much more real and difficult problem inherent in the doctrine of flexible response. This included the proposition that in certain circumstances, that is to say in the event of a Soviet attack by conventional forces in Europe which could not be successfully stopped by the conventional forces of the West, the choice would have to be made whether to allow the attack to succeed and vast areas of Western Europe to remain in Soviet occupation, or whether limited and selective use of nuclear weapons should be authorized by the West in order to impose a halt on the military operations. This would afford a pause in which an attempt might be made to end the dispute, at the same time advertising the readiness of the West to escalate to whatever degree might be necessary in order to prevent a Soviet victory.

The reason why Western leaders might be faced by this agonizing choice was briefly and bluntly that their conventional forces were not enough by themselves to be able in all circumstances to bring to a halt an attack by the more massive Soviet conventional military machine. This situation represented an unfortunate legacy of the decision of the 1950s, at a time when the United States still had nuclear superiority, that it was sufficient to threaten to use this superiority to deter — and if necessary to bring to an end — aggression of any kind in Europe. What was attractive to politicians in this formulation was not simply the overwhelming advantage of force on the Western side which was present at the time, but also the economy of means which it allowed them to enjoy in the provision of conventional forces in Europe. Long after the Western nuclear advantage disappeared and nuclear parity was accepted, with even some advantage on the Soviet side, the financial benefits of the reliance on nuclear weapons by the West persisted in the minds of short-sighted politicians, who finally persuaded themselves that the West could not afford to provide the necessary conventional level of forces and to maintain the level of social expenditure which seemed necessary in order to prevent the further dissolution of Western society.

Some unsung genius in the new Genscher-type defence secretariat managed to launch the idea and have it accepted by his European masters that the popular opposition to nuclear weapons could be fruitfully diverted into this other argument, namely that one of the most debatable not to say reprehensible possible uses of nuclear weapons by the West could be avoided if the level of conventional forces on the Western side were increased. If there was a reasonable chance that these forces could hold up or at least delay significantly a Soviet conventional attack then the choice whether to be the first to use nuclear weapons in Europe would be landed on the Soviet side and TNF would be required on the Western side in their original and proper purpose of deterring such first use by the Soviets and not in the much more unacceptable mode of possible first use by the West.

The creation of adequate Western conventional forces for this purpose clearly lay outside the scope of the possibilities of increased expenditure by individual European nations and could only be achieved both by the greater efficiency of co-operative defence efforts and by a manifestly equitable sharing of the load, such as could only be obtained through the operation of a united European defence.

This would have the further advantage that it helped greatly to bridge one of the main differences which divided Western Europe from America. The United States had for long felt it was paying more than its fair share in the defence of Western interests. For example, the concept of the rapid deployment force for use, say, in the Indian Ocean included the belief that it might involve the earmarking for operations there of forces which would otherwise have been available as reinforcements from the United States to Europe. It therefore seemed in many American eyes an obviously fair consequence of this proposal that if the United States had to use its forces in an area where the West Europeans were unable to operate militarily but where their interests were no less in need of defence than those of the Americans, the Europeans should ‘take up the slack’. That is to say that they should put themselves in a position to make good in Europe any deficiencies which might result from the fact that the US was obliged to operate in the general Western interest elsewhere. There was some West European objection to this train of thought not only because of the extra expense which would be required if European forces had to be increased in order to make good American deficiencies in Europe, but also because it seemed to give an automatic support by Western Europe to American policies in the rest of the world which might not have been adequately discussed or on which it might not have been possible to reach agreement. This caveat was reinforced by the manifest disagreement which was felt to exist between some aspects of American policy in the Middle East and that pursued by the European Community. The Americans seemed in many European eyes to be so much subject to the influence of the Jewish vote in the United States that they were unable to impose moderation on the policy of Israel, even though the latter depended on them for financial support and the supply of war material; and in particular because the United States would not accept, or could not prevail on Israel to accept, the necessity for including in a solution of the Middle East question due consideration of the rights of the Palestinians and the creation of a separate Palestinian state.

With this degree of divergence over the area in which it was most likely that the United States might have to take military action or, at least, use military force in a deterrent role, it was particularly difficult to expect that the West Europeans would, so to speak, endorse a blank cheque for American policy by agreeing in advance to take up the slack in Europe.

It was clear throughout the industrialized Western world, as well as in Japan, that if Arab oil dried up, industry would slow down — or even, here and there, come to a virtual stop. The unwillingness of successive administrations in the United States, under pressure from powerful political groups (particularly in New York) to accept the simple fact that to secure the oil flow would involve more sympathetic consideration of Arab interest in finding a solution to the Palestinian problem, was a major obstacle to progress. It also introduced further friction into US relations with Europe, where governments were able to take a rather less constrained view of the international scene in the Middle East than was easy for an American administration. To secure the oil flow and to solve the Palestinian problem, while not arousing dangerous political hostility at home, was for the United States a major problem. The attitude of European states, both to their responsibility in NATO and the possibility of joint action outside the NATO area, in defence of common interests, was to play an important part in encouraging Washington to find a way out of this involved and delicate problem.

The search for a way through this maze was greatly (and unexpectedly) assisted by no less than the Prime Minister of Israel with his virtual annexation of the Golan Heights in late 1981 and his subsequent cancellation of the strategic agreement with the United States which had provoked such outspoken European criticism. These actions and the consequent sharpening of relations between the United States and Israel at last made it possible for the former to adopt a policy with regard to the Middle East which was more in line with a reasonable interpretation of the position of the Arab countries and, at the same time, more in line with the views of Western Europe. This development removed the main obstacle to tacit acceptance by Western Europe of the doctrine of taking up the slack and thus provided yet another argument for the improvement of Western European conventional forces.

There were two other important consequences. The countries of Western Europe had been the better able to harmonize their policies towards the outside world the more these differed from those of the United States. They seemed to feel that West European positions were only to be announced as such when it could be shown that in so doing Europe was flexing its independent muscles and showing to the world that it did not necessarily have to behave as a satellite of the United States. This too had largely had its origin in the sharp opposition of the respective Middle East policies, and when that particular difficulty was on the way to being overcome it became easier for Europe to think in terms of a joint effort with the US to promote the interests of the whole Western world. But once it was decided to make the effort, the means of co-ordinating the defence of these Western interests were found to be greatly lacking. They were occasionally discussed at the so-called Western summits such as that which took place in Guadeloupe in 1978, but these meetings did not include all those who felt they should be included and moreover had no continuing machinery to see that such decisions as were made were carried out effectively. The usual answer to such criticism was that consultation within the Atlantic Alliance could take place over the whole world. This was formally true to the extent that consultation sufficed. Action, however, was another matter since the area of responsibility and operations of the Atlantic Alliance was specifically limited by its treaty to Europe and the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic area, thus excluding many of the countries and regions in which the more acute threat to Western interests was now being perceived. Here, too, new machinery was required and the need for it was partly met just in time before the onset of the Third World War.

The Western summit of 1982 not only attempted to formulate the policies to be followed by the Western world generally with regard to the safeguarding of essential supplies and the use of its economic predominance as a means of influencing world events and deterring further Soviet adventurism, but also took the first tentative step to set up a framework to which action on the lines of these decisions could be reported and further consequential decisions prepared. The mere extension of NATO’s areas, which might have seemed a simpler course, was not possible because not all its members were prepared to agree to it. So the alternative solution had to be adopted of a decision by those willing to participate in action outside the area to equip themselves with the necessary means of doing so. The Western Policy Staff was the rather cryptically-named organ to which at their summit meeting heads of government entrusted these new tasks and which in the event had just two years to begin to get into its stride before its utility was conclusively demonstrated.

The final cause of trans-Atlantic disunity — the difference in style and tempo — was more difficult to resolve. Over much of the period of the Atlantic Alliance there had been talk of completing it by an ‘Atlantic Community’, but this had never really amounted to more than conference rhetoric. The concept had been invoked when the Alliance was in trouble as, for example, after the Suez operation when relations between the United States and Britain and France were particularly strained. Resolutions were passed in favour of its creation but, in practice, nothing happened except two additions to the functions of the Alliance which were important in potential but never achieved their full impact. One of these was that the Alliance should concern itself with economic policy. This, however, was being handled in so many other international bodies that the NATO contribution to it never achieved significance. The other was more fruitful. The allies agreed that they would improve the consultation which took place within the Alliance about matters of common concern and this was extended from the original NATO area to all other areas of the world, with the severe handicap already mentioned that while it was possible to talk about out-of-area dangers it was still not possible within the Alliance, as part of the operations of the Alliance, to take concerted action with regard to them.

In later years the Atlantic Community concept had been relegated more clearly to the limbo of unrealized theories because of the growth and development of the European Community, to which the majority of the European members of the Alliance were prepared to devote much more effort than to the shadowy Atlantic concept. This dichotomy was specifically recognized by the advocacy in the middle 1960s of the ‘twin pillars’ by which it was understood that the Alliance should be composed of the United States and Canada on the one hand and a united Europe on the other hand. This, too, had not been fully realized. The proposition did little more, in fact, than serve as yet another obstacle to the realization of anything which could properly be described as a community embracing both sides of the Atlantic.

The clearest reason for the difficulty of giving reality to the ‘Atlantic Community’ was, of course, the disparity in size and power between the United States and the countries of Western Europe. The United States since the Second World War was the only country on the Western side that aspired to or had thrust upon it a world role, whereas the ex-imperial countries of Western Europe, while conscious of the loss of the world position that they had once enjoyed, had not always been able to reconcile themselves to the position of middle-ranking regional powers.

There was the further difficulty that the method of American policy-making was not geared to participation in an integrated community. It was difficult for allies to introduce their views into the agonizing process of public discussion and decision-making which was the method favoured by the United States, with its rigid separation of powers, and once a decision was taken it was difficult to expect that the Americans would be prepared to go through it all again in order to accommodate views coming from outside their own borders. The Alliance continued, therefore, with hard-headed appraisal on both sides of the outstanding value to all participants of a ‘Trans-Atlantic Bargain’, which was the phrase used by one distinguished American representative at NATO as the title of an illuminating book on the relationship. The essence of the bargain was the American guarantee that it would consider an attack on Western Europe as if it were an attack on the United States and the European assurance that Western Europe would provide an equitable share of the effort needed for its common defence. The bargain was only in danger when the Europeans seemed to be reluctant to make the same assessment as the Americans of what was equitable; or when the United States through force of circumstances felt it necessary to divert its attention and its effort in varying degrees away from Europe and particularly, as in the case of Vietnam, when this diversion was generally disapproved of by the Europeans and turned out, moreover, unsuccessfully.

The abrasive style of the Republican Administration in the early years of the 1980s and the growing United States preoccupation with the Middle East, South-West Asia and Central America coincided with the increasing volume of noise coming from Europe about nuclear disarmament. It also coincided with the kind of negative auction carried out between the smaller political parties in the Netherlands and Belgium which resulted in the reduction of their conventional defence effort and, at the same time, an expressed reluctance to allow the stationing of the new TNF on their territories. It was noted too in Europe that at a time when economic sanctions were much discussed and much advocated to show displeasure in Soviet action in Afghanistan and on the military seizure of power in Poland, the United States appeared unable to use for more than a very short period the one sanction which would seem to the man in the street to have the most possibility of success, namely to stop grain exports to the Soviet Union; and this not from any doubt as to its efficacy, but because American middle-western farmers, whose votes were so important to the US Administration, were unwilling to forgo the vast sales to the Soviet Union on which their farm economy was largely dependent.

It was fortunate for the West that the war broke out when it did and not later. The United States and Europe were to some extent on divergent tracks.

Chapter 4: Nuclear Arsenals

The early 1970s had seen the achievement by the Soviet Union of strategic nuclear parity with the United States. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) produced in May 1972 an agreement which set ceilings upon numbers of strategic ballistic missile launchers and a treaty which imposed limitations on anti-ballistic missile defence systems. Together these appeared to suggest that both superpowers had accepted the principle of mutual and assured destruction (MAD). In fact, neither had. To the USSR, deterrence lay in a demonstrable ability to fight, win and survive a nuclear war. The USA relied on a continuing technological superiority to check any Soviet confidence that this was possible. On both sides the 1970s witnessed a sharp growth in the numbers of deliverable warheads, largely owing to the introduction of multiple individually-targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRV), and a marked increase in the efficiency of guidance systems and thus in accuracy of delivery. The United States had doubled the numbers of its strategic warheads from around 5,000 in 1970 to over 11,000 in 1980; in the USSR the increase was from about 2,500 in 1970 to about 5,000 at the end of 1980, though this figure was due to rise to some 7,500 in the next few years. Meanwhile, accuracy in strategic weapons had improved on both sides, from circular error probable (CEP — the radius from a target within which 50 per cent of warheads directed at it would probably fall) of two and even three thousand feet down to (for missiles launched from the ground but not, as yet, from submarines) six or seven hundred.

The technological advantage, in terms of strategic weapons, of the USA over the USSR in 1980 was much less than it had been ten years before. Moreover, the total lethality of the American strategic armoury (its counter-military potential, in the jargon, or CMP), which was almost three times that of the USSR at the end of the 1970s, was overtaken and surpassed by the Soviet Union in the early eighties. The USA had some advantages in both bombers and submarines (of the thirty or so US ballistic missile submarines constantly held in readiness, up to twenty were at sea at any one time, as against no more than ten for the Soviet Union) and in anti-submarine warfare (ASW) techniques Western navies were definitely in front. In intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), however, the USSR would remain a good way ahead until the US Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) — a very accurate missile — and the MX ICBM would become operational in the second half of the eighties.

When the Soviet Union’s much more advanced arrangements for the protection of government and industry and for civil defence were taken into account, it was clear that the first half of the eighties would indeed open what the analysts tended to call, after Henry Kissinger, a ‘window of opportunity’ for the USSR. In spite of the enormous technical difficulty of launching a fully co-ordinated strategic nuclear first strike against US land-based ICBM and the certainty that even with optimum results this would leave a considerable strategic nuclear force in the United States as well as an intact US submarine force still able to reply, the opportunity open to the USSR to use its strategic nuclear lead in the first half of the 1980s to apply political pressures in international affairs was clear. If these failed to achieve decisive results there was always the possibility of open warfare in the field against NATO in Europe. In any case, the so-called ‘window of opportunity’ would not remain open for more than a few years.

Wherever the arguments led in the field of inter-continental nuclear strategy (that is to say, in what was unkindly described by some military men as ‘military metaphysics’), it was in connection with shorter-range theatre nuclear forces (TNF) that critical divisions and uncertainties developed in the Western Alliance. At the beginning of the eighties, the USSR was able, in the prevailing state of uneasiness in the West over the nuclear threat, to exploit these most effectively, through a massive propaganda campaign and with the aid of the ‘useful fools’.

For all the Soviet Union’s often displayed maladroitness, there is no doubt that its handling of Western concern over nuclear weapons was most skilful.

When the American strategic nuclear superiority in the 1960s gave way to the state of rough parity between the two superpowers, their vulnerability to each other’s inter-continental weapons was perhaps of less importance in the Alliance than the vulnerability to nuclear attack of the European allies. Whatever marginal advantage might accrue to either superpower from improved accuracy, the hardening or concealment of launchers, their increased mobility and so on, the simple fact remained that neither could be so hard hit by the other in a first strike as to be incapable of a devastating response. The critical question that began to emerge in the seventies was how far the US would be induced by the difficulties of the European allies in wartime to initiate a central attack on the Soviet Union. If the willingness of any American president to invite the appalling reprisals this would produce would be questionable (as it could hardly fail to be), what could be done to find an acceptable alternative? Thus was born, out of European uncertainty whether the USA could be relied upon to accept truly appalling damage at home on behalf of allies abroad, the debate on TNF and their modernization, a debate which did much to throw the Alliance into disarray and to offer the Soviet Union opportunities it did not fail to exploit.

The introduction into service by the USSR of the SS-20 ballistic missile and the Backfire bomber (to use the NATO term) in the late 1970s gave the Warsaw Pact new options for an attack on Western Europe, although Soviet military thinking saw this as only a continuance of an established line of policy. It was now possible, given the SS-20’s range of 3–4,000 miles (as against 1–2,500 for the SS-4 and 5 it was replacing), for the USSR to attack almost any major target in Western Europe from inside its own territory. None of NATO’s land-based missiles in Europe could reach beyond Eastern Europe into the USSR itself and the few nuclear-capable aircraft possessed by the Alliance, even if of just sufficient range, could not confidently count on penetration. There were, it is true, 400-odd Poseidon SLBM warheads assigned to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), but the use of any of these would be likely to invite Soviet attack on the continental United States itself, while attack by ICBM from the US, of course, would be certain to do so.

European concern over the imbalance in theatre nuclear capabilities led to NATO’s decision in December 1979 to install on the territory of European allies, through the next decade, 572 American missiles of greater range and accuracy than those at that time available. Thus 108 Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles would replace the Pershing I-A stationed in Germany, giving about 1,000 miles more range and, with their terminal radar guidance system, far greater accuracy. At the same time, 464 ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCM) would be installed, with a range of some 1,500 miles and a highly accurate terrain contour-matching guidance system known as TERCOM. Of these, 160 would be located in the UK, 96 in the Federal Republic of Germany, 48 each in Belgium and the Netherlands, and 112 in Italy. This decision, unanimously arrived at in the NATO Council, was accompanied by a proposal to negotiate with the USSR for the reduction of theatre nuclear systems. The deployment decision and the arms control proposal were seen as one package.

To the West the installation of these modernized weapons would do no more than correct a critical imbalance. To the Soviet Union, however, as Brezhnev had already warned, in an unsuccessful effort in October 1979 to avert the impending NATO decision, it was clearly seen as an attempt to change the strategic balance in Europe and give the West a decisive superiority. This would lie in affording the USA an option not hitherto available of attack upon the Soviet homeland (always an interest of paramount importance for the USSR) without using central strategic forces and so inviting attack on the American continent.

An immediate offer to halt the deployment of SS-20s would have cut the ground from under NATO’s feet. They were already being installed and would reach a total of some 250 by mid-1981, with a final total of 300 in 1982. Since in Soviet eyes this did no more than improve the effectiveness of an already established policy, no need was seen to depart from it and the offer was not made. The SS-20, the argument ran, was only replacing less efficient SS-4 and 5, with a greater range which would, as a bonus, enable all China to be targeted from inside the Soviet Union as well. The NATO move, however, was seen by the Soviet Union as a new and threatening departure, even though none of the modernized missiles would be ready before 1983 at the earliest.

The TNF decision also began to generate a heightened public uneasiness in Europe. The greater range, flexibility and accuracy conferred by the introduction of Pershing II and GLCM was seen as raising the possibility of actually fighting a nuclear war in Europe which could leave the USA unscathed. There was concern that US military thinking might be moving towards the concept of a containable or limited nuclear war, which would clearly, of course, be a war contained in Europe.

The proposal made by NATO that negotiations should begin upon limitation of TNF was followed up by preliminary discussions between the USA and the USSR in Geneva in the autumn of 1980, which had to be abandoned when the US Administration changed. Little was achieved other than a slightly clearer definition of positions, though it was at least agreed that the talks should remain bilateral and include continental systems based in Europe, though the Soviets were still hoping to bring in the so-called forward-based systems (FBS) as well, including SLBM and nuclear-capable aircraft on aircraft carriers in European waters.

The new US Administration made no attempt to restart the negotiations and the prospects for them were not greatly helped by Brezhnev’s offer at the 26th Party Congress in February 1981 of a moratorium on new medium-range missiles as soon as effective talks began. The SS-20 deployment programme was at that time nearing completion, with one missile coming into service every five days. The NATO deployment was still two to three years off.

Though many in the West saw in Brezhnev’s offer no more than blatant cynicism, it did reflect a genuine distinction made by the Soviets between what they were doing, which was much the same as before, and what NATO proposed, which to the Soviet way of thinking introduced an entirely new principle. It was also symptomatic of the unsettled state of public opinion in Western Europe at the time, that the Brezhnev proposal was welcomed by some (including the opposition Labour Party leadership in Britain) as a helpful concession.

The circumstances which more than anything else had led to President de Gaulle taking France out of NATO in 1966 looked now like being reversed. One of his chief objections was that in the Atlantic Alliance Europe was too closely linked with the United States. The Alliance, in fact, looked like becoming no more than a structure for the projection of American interests in Europe. Now, at the beginning of the eighties, there was a tendency to uncouple the defence interests of the United States from those of Europe and set up a situation which might have been rather more to de Gaulle’s liking. There is little doubt, however, that this tendency was seen by many thoughtful people in the West as presenting a serious threat to the Alliance and to world peace.

To prevent this diversion of interest from growing dangerously great it was imperative that the modernization of theatre nuclear weapons should be very closely associated with negotiations between the USSR and the USA for their reduction.

It was made abundantly clear to the US Administration (perhaps this had not been taken as seriously in Washington before now as it should have been) that uneasiness among the European allies and the highly vocal expression of popular discontent in which it was being manifested must be allayed, and this could only be done by what was seen to be a genuine move on the part of the United States to enter into serious negotiations with the Soviet Union on arms control.

In September 1981 the new US Secretary of State and the Soviet Foreign Minister met in New York to discuss a resumption of TNF talks which could start at the end of November in that year. There were still considerable reservations in Europe as to whether the United States was wholly serious in its stated intention to reach an agreement. It was only through strenuous efforts on the part of the US Administration that public opinion in Europe was eventually persuaded, at least in part, that real progress was being made. The process that was eventually to result in what came to be known as the START Treaty of 1984 was none the less truly under way. Its culmination in the summit meeting in January of that year might, it was thought, have had as much to do with the coming presidential campaign as with the conclusion of the business of negotiations.

An arms control treaty is an advantage to a conservative in an election year though an encumbrance to a liberal. This point was underlined by the fact that the ratification process in the US Senate was complete by the summer. The negotiations had been difficult but (though the outcome failed in differing ways, but to about the same degree, to satisfy both sides) not as difficult or as protracted as was expected, and the work that had gone into the abandoned SALT II Treaty of June 1979 saved much time in the formulation of definitions and of types of limitation.

The new treaty justified its descriptive acronym of START, Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. The term, proposed by the Americans at the outset of the new negotiations, was only accepted with misgivings by the Soviets, not so much because they rejected the explicit aspiration to reduce armaments, but because they wished to preserve continuity with the established SALT process. The substitution of ‘reduction’, however, for ‘limitation’ had such wide popular appeal, in Warsaw Pact countries scarcely less than in Western and even (to the limited extent that this was possible) in the USSR itself, that its acceptance was inevitable.

Unlike the SALT II agreement, which would only have lasted for five years, the START Treaty was to be of indefinite duration. In addition to this and the actual achievement of cuts, the key feature of START was that it also incorporated an interim agreement of the previous year to limit TNF in Europe.

Although much work had to be done on the rest of the Treaty, the US had pressed hard for an early deal on TNF to accompany the actual deployment of the first new Tomahawk GLCM in Britain and Italy in late 1983, with more to follow in West Germany and Belgium, but with none in the Netherlands, which had opted out. From December 1979, when the decision had first been taken by NATO to modernize the TNF, there had been a curious and ambivalent relationship between the implementation of the decision and arms control. Unless there was some chance of a serious diplomatic effort through arms control measures to remove the military requirement (or at least to reduce the number of weapons), it was not certain that any of the European nations would be willing to take these missiles in and very likely that some would refuse. At the same time, unless there was some chance of the programme being implemented, NATO would have no bargaining position, and without it would be unlikely to secure any cuts at all in the 250 Soviet SS-20 or the 350 older SS-4 and SS-5 missiles which also remained in service.

In their early stages the discussions on TNF arms control were not easy. This was in part a consequence of the mutual suspicions in the tense international climate following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, crisis in Poland, and the election of a US Administration bent on major rearmament. But the difficulties were even more a result of the sheer intractability of the issues: the USA wished to focus primarily on land-based missiles in the USSR that could hit Western Europe, which included many SS-20s based east of the Urals; the USSR wished to exclude weapons based outside Europe but include the American FBS, notably aircraft such as the F-111 and F-4 and even some aircraft carriers whose A-6 Intruder and A-7 Corsair aircraft could only attack Soviet territory with difficulty but which constituted a significant danger none the less. Lastly, because the Soviet SS-20 missiles were fitted with MIRV with three warheads (while the Pershing II and GLCM had only one warhead each) the US wished to use warheads as the basis for comparison while the USSR wished to count only the launchers. There was also the tricky question of the British and French nuclear forces which the Soviet Union wished to take into account, while Britain and France wanted them left out.

Not one of these issues was close to resolution by the time the talks (not yet in their new guise of START) began in mid-1982. This new beginning provided an opportunity to break the deadlock. The basic conceptual breakthrough was to try to identify a class of weapons which, though deployed in theatres, were essentially strategic in nature in their yield and in the targets they were likely to engage, and so ought to be linked with the other strategic weapons that had been considered appropriate for SALT.

Any demarcation line with nuclear weapons is inevitably arbitrary, but this approach made it possible to accept that the only United States TNF that deserved to be called strategic were the Tomahawk GLCM and Pershing II due for deployment, and the F-111 aircraft already based in Europe. On the Soviet side, account would have to be taken of the SS-20, SS-4 and SS-5 missiles, and the Backfire, Badger and Blinder aircraft under the command of the Soviet Long-Range Air Force. This allowed for all shorter-range systems to be excluded, perhaps for another negotiating forum, and got round the problem of how to justify the inclusion of Soviet systems facing China and some medium-range US aircraft based in the United Kingdom that would otherwise have been left out. The formula still could not accommodate the British and French strategic nuclear forces, but it was agreed to put off this issue, once again, for the next stage in the talks.

This broader definition of strategic weapons having been agreed, the issue then switched to how they should all be counted. In the past, the basic unit of account had been missile launchers or aircraft, with special categories for missiles with multiple warheads or bombers with air-launched cruise missiles (ALCM). The Americans attempted to introduce new counting rules whereby full notice would be taken of the properties of the various weapons, such as yield, accuracy and number of warheads. These proved complicated to formulate, however, and raised verification difficulties, and were anyway strongly resisted by the Soviet side. Eventually the Americans gave up on these new rules but pressed instead for stricter restrictions on MIRV missiles and greater co-operation on verification procedures. The main concession that the US made was to accept that major deployment of submarine-launched cruise missiles (SLCM), then being contemplated by Washington, would undermine any agreement. This concession led to the resignation of the US Navy Secretary.

The eventual agreement reached was to place a limit of 2,000 on the strategic forces (bombers, ICBM and SLBM) on each side (compared with a figure of 2,250 that had been part of the 1979 SALT II agreement). However, the new ceiling also had to accommodate the weapons based in Europe. Ceilings were placed on missiles with MIRV (including the SS-20) and aircraft carrying ALCM (1,000) and on ICBM with MIRV (650). The Soviets made a token cut of fifty in their giant ‘heavy’ ICBM (to 250) and accepted that the USA could build weapons of a similar size should they desire (which was unlikely). Each side would be free to mix its weapon types and their geographical distribution within these limits but at least 200 could be based in Europe. NATO decided that this figure would be sufficient for its needs in Europe. Since this meant a cut to a quarter of the planned complement of missiles and aircraft it was readily accepted as a significant arms control achievement — achieved multilaterally.

Such was the situation reached in the mid-eighties as mankind moved on towards an uncertain and forbidding future. Both sides stood like brooding giants, each guarding a store of weapons more than enough to destroy the entire population of the planet. Both deeply hoped that none of these deadly engines would ever need to be employed but their hopes were based on different thinking. On the Soviet side the aim was to offer to Western democracies a choice between a war of nuclear annihilation on the one hand, or acceptance on the other of piecemeal absorption into a communist world. If, in the event, the use of force had to be initiated it would, in the Soviet concept, be in the first instance with conventional weapons but sufficiently powerful to make the use of nuclear means unnecessary. On the Western side the most widely favoured aim was to possess sufficient non-nuclear war-fighting strength to halt an initial thrust by conventional means alone. This would leave the Soviets to choose between calling a halt, or invoking a nuclear exchange which would mean appalling and unpredictable disaster on both sides with little possible advantage in the outcome to anyone.

Western hopes lay, therefore, in the creation of an adequate non-nuclear armoury, in which the early years of the 1980s had shown disquieting deficiencies. What had been done to correct these, how far it was effective and how far it fell short we shall now enquire.

Chapter 5: Weapons

New tools for the battlefield, that is to say, weapon systems based on advances in technology, often remain without being tried out upon the battlefield itself for many years. The Israelis, for example, had used equipment produced in the United States in the 1973 war and the Americans themselves had had their last opportunity to try out major new systems in the war in Vietnam. Some of the newer equipment on the Soviet side was seen to work successfully in the hands of Egyptian clients in 1973 and the Soviet Union was itself able to employ newer versions of it, as well as the older and better known, behind the screens set up round Afghanistan from 1980 onwards. In helicopters, for example, in which the USSR had made very considerable advances, variants of the MI-24 type known as Hind D and E, were particularly useful for the location and destruction of pockets of Mujaheddin tribesmen. In Afghanistan, also, the Soviets used scattered mines which, although produced and issued in considerable numbers elsewhere had hitherto had little use. They also used some chemical agents.

Such situations as these, however, differed widely from that of the central conflict towards which the great powers were heading in the summer of 1985. In north-western Europe much of the equipment of both sides and their war-fighting techniques — which in some respects had developed radical differences — had never yet been tested in battle.

It was generally agreed that the tank, though there had been over the past score or more years occasional attacks upon its supreme position, was still the key factor on the land battlefield. Both on the Western and on the Soviet side there had been very considerable improvements in the tanks now in service, mainly in better protection, higher mobility, greater lethality in the main armament and in more effective fire control.

In the United States tank fleet the well-tried M-60A3 (which had been replacing the M-60A1) was now itself being replaced by the new M-1, the Abrams. Some of the earlier types were still in service in the US Army at the beginning of the eighties but by 1985 the Abrams was widely deployed. It had an advanced 1500 hp gas turbine engine and when it first came into service had used the 105 mm rifled gun as its main armament. The Abrams was now being furnished with the same type of 120 mm smooth-bore gun as was to be found in the German Leopard II. It had been the intention that all tank battalions in the United States Army in Europe (USAREUR) should be armed with the Abrams by the summer of 1985, but owing to delays in budgetary procedure little more than half the US main battle tank units in Europe were equipped with the Abrams carrying the new gun.

There is still argument between those who favoured the rifled gun and those who favoured the smooth bore as the more effective tank destroyer. This will no doubt continue, since results from the use of both these two guns on the Allied side in the war we are studying have not yet offered conclusive evidence one way or the other.

The British Chieftain was still as effective a fighting machine as any on the battlefield. It had a powerful and reliable engine, a highly effective 120 mm gun, a new laser range-finding system together with night-vision sighting, as well as well-proven stabilization equipment, impressive armour and useful speed. Challenger, with its superbly protective so-called Chobham armour (named after the establishment where it was developed) and its 120 mm rifled gun was also coming into regimental service. It was a magnificent tank but its introduction to British regiments in 1984 had so far only resulted in the addition of 100 or so of these outstanding fighting machines to Allied Command Europe at the time war broke out.

For the German Bundeswehr, the Leopard II was a marked improvement on Leopard I. In addition to its powerful new gun, Leopard II had a fully integrated fire control and stabilization system, a shorter response time, laser sighting, a higher first-round hit probability and, with the new sub-calibre ammunition, more effective penetration. Two thousand of these tanks had been scheduled in 1981 for procurement by 1987, but no more than half of these were in service with Federal German troops in 1985.

On the Soviet side, too, there had been improvements. Their newest tank, the T-80, was beginning to come into use shortly before the outbreak of war, but the main battle tank of the Warsaw Pact forces was the T-72, which had succeeded the T-64. The latter was still widely deployed, however, particularly among non-Soviet members of the Warsaw Pact. Produced in Kharkov, in the Ukraine, the T-64 had a powerful 125 mm smooth-bore gun with mechanical loading, allowing a rate of fire of up to eight rounds per minute at ranges out to 2,000 metres, with a three-man crew, improved armour, a newly designed 780 hp engine, better suspension, advanced infra-red sighting and (like the Chieftain) laser range-finding. This tank, however, was not popular with its users. They found it unreliable. It shed its tracks. It had, in fact, been brought out in haste as the answer to the projected NATO main battle tank known as MBT-70, which was never produced. Its successor, the T-72, was built in the Urals. It still at first had the same 125 mm gun as the T-64 but this was shortly succeeded by a newer and much more effective type of gun of the same calibre. The next tank model, the T-80, was manufactured in Leningrad and showed still further improvements in armoured protection, with a new engine and a new suspension. Comparatively few T-80 tanks were to be found in 1985 in service with the Red Army.

Soviet tanks were generally simpler and of rougher design than those of the Western allies. They were less complex to maintain but on the whole lacking in engine power and liable to break down. The much lower level of sophistication in Soviet armoured equipment was very noticeable, the result of a requirement to produce tanks which could be readily manned by crews with a relatively low level of intelligence and education.

All of the three types of Soviet main battle tank which would chiefly be encountered in the war weighed round about 40 tons. Higher weights were to be found among those of the Western allies. As for ranges, NATO tank armaments were capable of engaging targets out to 4,000 metres. There had long been argument as to whether this long range was really an advantage and whether it would not have been better to sacrifice some of it to secure other advantages. Certainly the ranges of Soviet tank guns were nothing like as great. The theory behind Western tank design was that Warsaw Pact opponents could be expected to concentrate tanks in high numerical superiority, given choice in time and place of attack and given also the greater number of tanks they had in the theatre. This meant that the attrition of the armoured enemy had to begin as soon as possible to diminish the probability of being overwhelmed by numbers when the enemy got closer in, and it therefore had to begin at the furthest range. It is true that the fullest exploitation of such long ranges, out to 3,000 and 4,000 metres, depended much on visibility and also on the openness of terrain. In poor weather, mist or smoke, or in close country, it was never easy and often impossible to acquire targets at anything like these ranges. The tactical handling of tanks with the longest ranges, like the Chieftain, came more and more to be dominated by the search for suitable firing positions giving the furthest range of vision. Allied fire control systems, with laser range-finding and sighting equipment, ensured a high probability of first-round hits. Thermal imaging sights, such as those used in the US Abrams, and other sighting equipment for use in very poor visibility did much to extend the usefulness of the main armaments of Allied tanks.

In the need for the earliest possible attrition of the enemy’s tank numbers, surveillance of the battlefield was of the highest importance. There were still regrettable gaps in NATO in the availability of adequate equipment for this purpose. The British, for example, had had a project, known as Supervisor, or under the ungainly title of the medium-range unmanned aerial surveillance and target acquisition system (shortened into the mouth-cracking acronym MRUASTAS), which had been cancelled in 1980. A new system, Phoenix, which would fill this gap in the British capability for effective indirect fire, was just coming into service, however. New munitions were being developed to kill tanks at ranges of up to 30 kilometres but the means of acquiring targets for them had fallen behind. Drones, or what were more precisely described as remotely-piloted vehicles (RPV) (such as the Franco-Canadian-German Drone CL-289) were, within their limitations, of considerable use in the acquisition of hard targets in depth. The most consistently reliable means available up to the outbreak of war was still that of observation by men on the ground with sensors which were simple and robust but not, of course, as flexible or controllable as other systems would have been. They also made heavy demands on the men carrying out the observation.

What was known as sideways-looking airborne radar also had a useful role to play. It could indicate from an aircraft the location of tank concentrations which could then be plotted and attacked with area weapons. The acquisition of hard targets in depth, however, still had a long way to go.

There was an interesting and promising heliborne system in the United States forces known as SOTAS (stand-off target acquisition system) with a moving-target indicator radar. This had just begun to come into service by mid-1985. The few aircraft that had this capability when war broke out were to prove of high value in tracking the movement of enemy vehicles and providing divisional commanders with adequate information to permit them to attack second echelon forces with mass fire power as the prelude to planned counterattacks. Attack upon the second echelon, or follow-up forces, had long been seen to be one of the most important ways of diminishing the forward momentum of the Soviet attack. Anything that could contribute here was valuable. Another sensor system, the remotely-monitored battlefield sonar system (or REMBASS, in the uncouth language of technical acronyms which military equipment seems to spawn so freely) was expected to come into NATO service in 1983 or 1984, but this was another of those battlefield aids of the highest importance that had been held up in the pipeline.

It was ironic that by August 1985 the means of attacking hard targets in depth was still well ahead of means of finding targets to attack. The new ammunition available to 155 mm guns in NATO from the US armoury included Copperhead, the cannon-launched guided projectile. Copperhead required a laser beam to be reflected from its target by a source known as a designator. The projectile then homed in on this. The problem was to keep the laser directed at the target tank during the critical time. Stay-behind parties of stouthearted men had been trained in this and had the necessary communications to synchronize their target designations with the firing of missiles from up to 15 kilometres behind them. Following targets moving at 30 kph across country is no easy matter, however. Moreover, laser designators were still in 1985 bulky items of equipment, not easy to conceal and almost impossible to move around by stealth.

The remote anti-armour mine system (RAAMS), which could also be delivered by guns, proved to be an important and lethal partner to Copperhead. It was highly effective in attacking the bellies of tanks where the plate was not more than 20 mm thick. Several salvoes from a 155 mm artillery battery produced small minefields scattered around tank concentrations which restricted movement and gave better opportunities for Copperhead.

A novel and useful munition came into service in USAREUR in

1984 called seek and destroy armour, shortened into the not infelicitous little acronym SADARM. An artillery projectile exploding in an airburst releases sub-munitions, which then descend by parachute, swinging and scanning for hard targets. Their sensors emit millimetric wave signals and where there is a response (which would hardly come from anything but a tank or self-propelled gun) the sub-munition fires a charge through the top of it. Although a virgin weapon in 1985, these looked like being winners and V and VII US Corps took in the relatively small numbers available most gladly. The very high importance of early reduction in the numerical superiority of Soviet tanks fully justified the accelerated funding of this project in the early 1980s.

Artillery guns (as opposed to rocket equipments) were of course of the highest importance. Happily the Western allies had long agreed on a common calibre of 155 mm. A towed version of a British-German-Italian gun in this calibre (the FH-70) had already been operational for some years. What was needed was the self-propelled version of the same gun, the SP-70. Such of these as were in service in 1985 were expected to survive well on the battlefield and prove themselves to be agile and effective, the improved ammunition and range of up to 29 kilometres being most welcome. In far greater numbers, however, the familiar American-built SP M-109 and M-110 would still provide the main means of artillery fire-delivery in depth.

Dangerous though the numerical superiority of Warsaw Pact armour would be, its attrition was not the only task of the artillery. The traditional role of counter-battery fire, to reduce the effectiveness of the enemy’s artillery, would still have a high priority. It was to be expected that on both sides, after every engagement, guns would have to move to another site to avoid the enemy’s counter-bombardment. Location of gun position was with modern techniques too efficient to permit of sitting around. The calls for fire support that could be expected on FH-70, SP-70 and M-109 and M-110 guns, were bound to be heavy and might in the event far outweigh their ability to respond, demonstrating all too clearly NATO’s relative shortage of artillery.

The Soviet Union disposed of a heavy 122 mm mortar called the BM-21, which was capable of firing forty rockets either singly, or in groups, or in what is daintily described as ‘ripples’ in which one huge deafening and destructive impact is closely followed by another, and another. The 240 mm successor to this equipment was also in service by the summer of 1985. The huge quantity of fire that multiple rocket launchers can put down has enormous shock effect. The NATO response to the introduction of these Soviet multiple rocket systems was to develop a new American-German-British multiple-launch rocket system (MLRS), which fired two packs of six rockets, also singly or in ripples, out to a range of 40 kilometres. It was just as well that the first batteries of NATO’s multiple rocket launchers had been introduced in all Allied armies by 1984, giving troops some idea of the scale of bombardment to be expected. To experience this on the receiving end in complete surprise for the first time would be totally stunning.

Rivers and canals in the Federal Republic were developed, in the short time available, into the best possible obstacles. Bridge demolition chambers had been built into new bridges in the Federal Republic until the mid-seventies, but since then their design had incorporated no easy system for destruction. The engineer effort involved in preparing the demolition of all sizeable river crossings was enormous. Much more could have been done if even modest funds had previously been devoted to the development of more rapid demolition systems. As it was, many major bridges had to be left intact.

Soviet tanks were at one time required to have a swimming capability but this turned out to be a total failure and the USSR had no amphibious tanks in service in 1985. All types of Soviet main battle tank could, however, be waterproofed and fitted with a snorkel for air intake. Their self-propelled (SP) guns and armoured personnel carriers were expected to swim.

Where recent Soviet experience would be likely to stand them in good stead would be in the use of helicopters. Their MI-24 Hind types, the Hind D and Hind E particularly, which had been developed as gunships, that is to say as flying weapons platforms, had given them in the occupation of Afghanistan the most valuable possible experience and now provided formidable weapon systems. A variety of weapon fittings had evolved (Hind D now carried a turreted gun) in addition to heavier protection, while in the development of their tactics the Soviets had made great strides. These two really powerful gunships would certainly prove to be more battleworthy and far less vulnerable than the MI-24 Hind A, which was still in service, from which they had been developed. Their pilots had been trained to operate without friendly ground support. Their casualties would be numerous, that was certain, but the effectiveness of this new highly-developed instrument of war was likely to be reaffirmed at every major obstacle and whenever the pace of the armoured battle began to flag. The pattern to be expected was that Hind attacks would probably be followed up with landings, in at least company strength, from Hip troop-carrying helicopters, of which MI-8 — Hip E — was a late assault development. The deep penetration of sorties such as this would naturally cause commanders to worry about disruption in the rear but the real successes that these helicopter operations would seek to achieve would lie in the maintenance or renewal of forward momentum in the mainly armoured attack.

Would the helicopter now be taking over from the tank, as the tank’s most lethal enemy? This was by no means certain. What had to be ensured, if war came, was that the Hind should not be allowed to become the undisputed owner of low-level airspace. The helicopter did look, however, like laying a claim to be the tank’s heir presumptive.

Other helicopters whose performance reinforced this claim, in addition to Hind, were the now well-established US UH-1 Cobras but even more the new AH-64 Apache with its Hellfire, fire-and-forget laser-guided anti-tank missile. Outright dogfights between opposing helicopter forces on any scale would probably be avoided, since neither adversary had a truly effective helicopter air-to-air weapon, though both sides were proceeding hastily in the early 1980s with promising developments. With equipment in service the best results would come where imagination was most actively applied. It was very likely that those Western allies who possessed relatively few helicopters would tend to hold their precious fleets in hand for special situations while those with more extensive assets could use them from the outset more boldly in the forward areas. The British Army Lynx, introduced in the early 1980s and fitted with the TOW (tube-launched optically-tracked wire-guided) missile for anti-armour use, would tend, for example, to be kept out of contact until the Soviet attacking forces had closed right up. The Lynxes, which might be said to be more vulnerable than the gunship helicopters, could play a highly important part in dealing with a well-defined enemy breakthrough. By hovering low and using the full 4,000-metre range of the tow missile, Lynx would be able to keep out of range of enemy air defence and out of sight of ground-to-ground weapons, while still delivering an effective attack. The high mobility of these aerial vehicles and the lethality of tow would make them a natural counter-attack force. The use of scatterable mines (or RDM — remotely-delivered mines) to delay and distract the attention of Soviet armour could improve the kill rate of Lynx and other anti-armour helicopters considerably. The United States’ helicopter force would work in much the same way as this, but with deeper forays beyond the forward line of troops, in conjunction with fixed-wing strike aircraft such as the A-10 Thunderbolt. Attack upon the second echelon would be of high importance.

The Franco-German HOT (high-subsonic optically teleguided) anti-tank missile system, used in the helicopters of both France and the FRG, with a range from 75 to 4,000 metres and sufficiently massive penetration to defeat any known tank in service in the mid-eighties, could not fail to make a valuable addition to the NATO anti-tank armoury.

The part likely to be played by rotary-wing aircraft has been stressed here because of its intimate association with the land battle. A truer air war could also be expected to range widely and deeply, with 2 and 4 ATAF (Allied Tactical Air Forces) initially intent on winning the air battle in the face of greater numbers of aircraft and of really formidable Warsaw Pact air defence. The opening high explosive and chemical attack on NATO airfields could expect success to the extent that, delivered with surprise, it would leave the Western allies with somewhat reduced resources and less flexibility. Defence against chemical warfare would severely reduce the efficiency of personnel and increase turn-round time on airfields. Shelters had been hardened, however, and alert procedures improved to ensure the survival of as many as possible of the aircraft attacked on the ground.

Interdiction, wherever possible, and attrition of enemy forces in depth would form the major offensive role of the Allied air forces, with the ground forces getting relatively little close support in the early stages except in cases of extreme urgency. The devastating tank-busting capability of the US A-10 Thunderbolt, though its full exploitation invited uncomfortably high losses, would be especially effective in these emergency situations, as well as when working with anti-tank helicopters in seeking out and destroying the Soviet armour, as is described in the next chapter.

In its ground forces the United States had by the summer of 1985 replaced many of its M-113 APC with the new Bradley M-2 infantry fighting vehicle. The Bradley M-2, which was not just a new ‘battle taxi’ but a true fighting machine, could make a world of difference since it gave each squad its own tow missile, to be fired from under the shield of armour, and for close-in protection a 25 mm electrically-fired Bushmaster gun capable of destroying light armour and firing a high-explosive anti-personnel round as well. The squad also had the Dragon medium-range ATGW (anti-tank guided weapon). The infantry could not yet be said to be a match for armour but it could certainly now give a better account of itself under armoured attack than before.

If there was one area of almost desperate deficiency in Allied Command Europe (ACE) in the middle 1980s it was in air defence. Overall air defence planning in NATO only began to take real shape at the beginning of the eighties with the formulation of the Air Defence Planning Group’s programme. This was to take in all air command and control (both offensive and defensive), NATO airborne early warning, NATO IFF (identification friend or foe), the multi-functional information distribution system (MIDS) and air defence weapons. In a programme initiated in 1980, intended to be implemented over fifteen years, it was sad, if inevitable, that little progress had been made in the five years before the war. NATO looked like going to war with air defences of very uneven capability which cried out, as with so much else in NATO, for standardization.

Medium- and high-level missile air defence in ACE was still provided by Hawk (homing-all-the-way killer) and Nike. Patriot, a far superior system to either, could probably have replaced both, operating (as the sales talk put it) ‘from treetop level to very high altitude’. It had proved expensive to develop and was not available in time to be generally deployed in Europe before the outbreak of war, though it was just coming into service in early 1985. Its absence would be felt. At lower levels, protection was afforded by Rapier. The new type of tracked Rapier system introduced in the early eighties enormously enhanced air defence in both Northern and Central army groups in the Central Region. The very low-level cover provided by the American man-portable Redeye (in British and Canadian formations by Blowpipe), all too sparsely spread, would leave vulnerable points too often totally exposed. Stinger, a US shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapon, began to supersede Redeye in 1981 and was generally in service in USAREUR in 1985. It used passive infra-red (IR) homing, the missile operating independently after initial arming and launch by the operator. This was a great step forward in low-level air defence. Among NATO allies the Federal Republic of Germany was the first to adopt Stinger but others followed. It was in wide (but unhappily not general) use in the Central Region in 1985. The US, German and Dutch formations had air defence weapons not greatly dissimilar from the Soviet ZSU-23-4 radar-controlled anti-aircraft gun. The US divisional air defence system (DIVADS) offered promise and the German SP armoured anti-aircraft system Gepard (Cheetah), with its twin 35 mm guns, was costly but might prove its value against air attack, even at $4 million per copy. One advantage to NATO was that Soviet pilots had neither the equipment nor the training to fly quite as low as those of 2 and 4 ATAF. They would therefore be more exposed to earlier radar detection and subsequent attack.

In the whole vital problem of controlling battlefield airspace, NATO IFF was one case of particularly badly needed rationalization and improvement. It is worth enlarging upon this as an example.

It is essential to know very quickly whether an approaching aircraft is hostile, IFF interrogates it by sending out a group of pulses to which another group of pulses is sent back in reply by what is known as a transponder. If this answer is correct — that is, as expected — the aircraft is friendly. If not, it is hostile.

The system, long in use, had been adequate when warfare was less complex, electronics less advanced, and airspace, especially lower airspace, less crowded. It was scarcely adequate in the 1980s. It could be jammed, either accidentally or deliberately. It could be ‘spoofed’ by an imitation of the right answer. The emission, whether of interrogation or answer, could be tracked to source and serve as a beacon to bring in guided- or homing-attack. It had blind spots. It had reliability problems. What was good for the 1960s was hardly good enough for the higher pressures of the 1980s. A soldier in a trench with a Stinger would have an advanced IFF with him but if he got it wrong, and pressed the trigger when he should not, he could destroy a $20 million aircraft and a pilot. It is said that in the early days of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war the Egyptians shot down eighty-one Israeli aircraft and sixty-nine of their own.

As the 1980s opened, the urgent need for a new identification system for NATO was realized and a development programme launched. Its cost was estimated to be at least $250 million, and the resultant replacement of the current IFF, in which some $2,000 million had already been invested, could hardly be complete by the end of the century. NATO would have to go to war with the IFF it had, depending more and more upon procedural method in the management of airspace.

Soviet air defence systems in the probable battle zone ranged from SA-2 up to SA-14, with the new generation starting at SA-8. The mobile medium- to low-level SA-6 and the hand-held low-level SA-7 had proved themselves, without any question, many years before in Sinai, and the successor equipments were even more effective, lethal and mobile. The ZSU-23-4 radar controlled anti-aircraft gun was still in service in 1985 in spite of its age and no equivalent equipment in NATO came anywhere near to matching it in terms of numbers. It was probably the most feared item of the Warsaw Pact battlefield air defence armoury.

In the US artillery the automated tactical fire-direction system (TACFIRE), so long awaited, began to come into service in USAREUR in 1981 and was well established in 1985, giving much increased responsiveness and control. The British battlefield artillery target engagement system (BATES) was another example of the application of microprocessor technology to the central control of artillery, transmitting accurate fire orders from observer to gun in milliseconds and producing the swift response necessary for the engagement of fleeting targets. The use of this system, though it had faults, marked a quantum jump in British methods of artillery control and was expected to do much to compensate for the shortage of guns in the two British corps in NORTHAG. In both cases, in TACFIRE and BATES, the failure of government, in the US no less than in the UK, to ensure adequate and timely funding resulted in dangerous delays in bringing systems of incalculable value into service.

It was fortunate for NATO in 1985 that the Assault Breaker concept, already in 1978 under research and development in the United States but threatened by budgetary hazards thereafter, had been at least partially rescued in time. This was an attempt to provide non-nuclear response to armoured superiority, with improved effectiveness against first-echelon forces but with the emphasis on second and third echelons up to 160 kilometres in depth. It had been from the first a joint US Army/Air Force project, involving an airborne target acquisition and weapons delivery system (TAWDS) and a ground-based army element. The full exploitation of the potential of Assault Breaker depended on the development of systems such as the helicopter-borne SOTAS mentioned earlier. The Patriot missile (originally intended as a surface-to-air missile, or SAM, but now also to be used as a surface-to-surface missile, or SSM) could be guided both from a ground-based command and control centre or from an airborne command post if the ground centre were out of action. An essential element in Assault Breaker was to be the use of terminally- guided sub-munitions. Each bomblet (or Smartlet, as these developments of ‘smart’ munitions came to be called) was furnished with a terminal seeker and a limited degree of manoeuvrability. The seeker would send out a millimetric wave signal to which there would be from the unwitting target an involuntary response. The weapon would then lock on to the response and find its path to the target. It was unfortunate that funding in the US for the development of Assault Breaker was so far reduced in the early 1980s that the whole system was only partially in troop service by 19 84.

In the field of chemical warfare (CW) the offensive capability available to Warsaw Pact armies in the field was well known, as well as the use to which in Soviet military practice it could be put. Specialist CW personnel, perhaps numbering in the aggregate 150,000, were deployed in the Red Army down to battalions. Some 15 per cent of all Soviet artillery ammunition carried chemical fillings, with up to 50 per cent of theatre and strategic missiles armed in the same way. The availability of aircraft fitted with spray tanks was high.

The practice would be to employ non-persistent non-lethal or incapacitating agents in the advance in bombardment preparatory to attack, for example, on positions it was intended to overrun or occupy. Such agents would disperse in a matter of minutes. Tear gas, or the CS used in civil disturbance, are good examples of such agents. What are known in the West as DM and DC, with secondary effects such as nausea, giddiness and reduction of the will to fight, are military versions. Non-persistent agents include chlorine and phosgene, lethal when sufficient is inhaled, but by the early 1980s thought to be of little use on account of unreliability.

More persistent agents, including blister gases — for example mustard and nerve agents such as the highly lethal Tabun (GA) and Soman (DC) — would be used to seal flanks and deny areas not intended for occupation, as well as to attack airfields, often in conjunction with delayed-action bombs.

The purpose of all CW attack would be twofold: to inflict casualties, and by causing opponents to take full protective action to impede performance.

It is difficult for anyone without experience of exacting work done under full CW protection to realize how far it saps efficiency. Protective clothing is burdensome and hot, and physical work in it is very exhausting. Staff work, though not so demanding physically, is difficult in respirators and thick gloves. The maintenance of effective seals over apertures such as windows, doors and hatches is time-consuming and involves severe self-discipline. Decontamination demands not only appropriate equipment and a plentiful water supply, but also minute care, which diverts attention and resource from other essential tasks. Men get accustomed to some degree to the discomforts and distractions of CW precautions but they are rarely more than 50 per cent efficient under them and tire quickly.

It was known that Warsaw Pact defensive capabilities in the field were inferior to those of the West, where British protective clothing and equipment were of outstanding quality, and alarm and other precautionary procedures were well practised. Other NATO members followed in varying degrees of effectiveness. The great disadvantage on the Western side was the general lack of a retaliatory capability everywhere but in USAREUR. Stocks of offensive toxic agents in the US had once been high but had deteriorated, or been dispersed, or destroyed so far that by 1980 they could be said (and were, by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) to be virtually non-existent. One SACEUR after another from the late 1970s onwards had emphasized that only the availability of an adequate retaliatory capability could be considered an effective defence against Soviet CW.

Interest lay chiefly in what is known as the binary round, a projectile in which two substances of a non-toxic nature are combined in flight and become a toxic substance before impact. Though there were technical difficulties (a short flight, for example, put obstacles in the way of effective combination of ingredients), the great merit of the binary round lay in safety of handling and storage, and a possible reduction in the sensitivity of Allied countries about hosting it in peacetime. The production of the binary round was recommended in the US in the early 1980s but it had not proved possible to store any in European countries by the summer of 1985. A useful step forward, however, had been the bilateral agreements between the United States on the one hand and Federal Germany and the UK on the other for the manufacture of quantities of such munitions for 155 mm artillery. They were to be stored for the time being in the US and brought forward when required.

Thus the armed forces on the Soviet side were in 1985 well prepared for offensive CW action but not over-well equipped to withstand attack, and on the other side quite well (in the case of the British, very well) prepared in defence but with a retaliatory capability confined entirely to the Americans. It was unlikely that, if a Warsaw Pact attack involved early and widespread use of CW in the field, the Western allies would fail to make use of the US capability to respond. This, however, would involve delay on the Western side and give the Soviets some initial advantage. This was almost certainly what was intended.

The Soviets would without doubt employ CW from the start of any offensive and the Western allies were well and truly warned to expect it. It was also highly probable that the two US corps would not be attacked in this way since it was a fair guess that the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) would find some way of employing the American retaliatory capability on his own authority in support of US troops, using munitions flown in for the purpose. This would be well known on the other side, as would also be the inability of other Western allies to retaliate in kind, at least for the time being, on their own behalf. Allied casualties, if war broke out, could be confidently expected but if precautions were taken and discipline prevailed they need not be high.

In aircraft the Alliance was compelled on the whole, in the years leading up to the war, to make do with what it had, or at any rate to improve it as best it might by stretching existing capabilities a little further, rather than to try to introduce far-reaching innovations. Given the financial constraints, Allied air forces, with an immense concentration of effort, did not do too badly.

The EF-111, for example, was an improved jammer built into an F-111 airframe, capable of Mach 2-plus speeds at height and a supersonic performance at sea level. Being also highly manoeuvrable it was a good survivor. The EF-111 carried ten high-powered jammer transmitters and a terminal-threat warning system which detected weapons-associated radar emissions and would provide flight crews with warning of impending attack from SAM anti-aircraft artillery or interceptors. These aircraft, beginning to enter service in 1983, were expected to prove very effective as deep-penetration escorts. In the Second World War the protection of deep penetration by an air force was provided by fighter escort or, when beyond its range, by the capacity of the bomber to fight its own way through the enemy’s interceptors, as in the US 8th Air Force. In the 1980s the penetrating aircraft had to be protected primarily from the result of electromagnetic emissions, whether its own or the enemy’s, which would serve to guide gun, missile or interceptor attack towards it. The EF-111 development typified modern trends.

So did the TR-1, a retooled version of the old U-2 (what the press called the ‘spy plane’), a high-altitude (over 70,000 feet), long-range (over 3,000 miles) reconnaissance and surveillance platform providing battlefield information to tactical commanders. This aircraft, too, was a definite plus. It had advanced electronic counter-measures (ECM), synthetic aperture radar systems, and capability to direct precision strikes against enemy radar emitters (PLSS — precision location strike system) and to collect ELINT (electronic intelligence) data. It began coming into NATO service in the early 1980s.

The story was the same with the F-4G, a modified F-4E Phantom, containing advanced electronic warfare equipment and armed with anti-radiation missiles, of which the latest, AGM-88 — HARM (high-speed anti-radiation missile) — was just coming into service when war broke out.

The F-15 Eagle was still in service, with a newer version, the Strike Eagle, carrying improved systems and possessing a better all-weather capability. The F-16 Fighting Falcon, which began to come into squadron service in 1981, represented a real advance. Its equipment included a multi-mode radar with a clutter-free look-down capability, head-up displays, internal ‘chaff (strips of foil which act as decoy to enemy homing missiles) and flare dispensers, a 500-round 20 mm internal gun and ECM, all in an aircraft with speed around Mach 2, a ceiling of more than 50,000 feet and a ferry range greater than 2,000 miles. This was a great improvement on any fighter the Western allies had hitherto seen. The F-18 Hornet, a one-man multiple-mission fighter bomber of even more advanced type, attractive to both navies and air forces, had suffered many delays in development and was not yet in service when war broke out.

A further development of high significance was the E-3A Sentry airborne warning and control system (AWACS). Into a Boeing 707 airframe had been fitted equipment which made up a mobile, flexible, jamming-resistant, surveillance and command, control and communications system, capable of all-weather, long-range, high or low surveillance of all air vehicles, manned or unmanned, above all types of terrain. Its look-down radar gave it a unique capability hitherto absent. Sentry could operate for six hours, on station 1,000 miles from home base, with a maximum speed of 530 mph and a ceiling of 29,000 feet. Details of how it worked are given in the next chapter. Its entry into service in 1980 and into NATO in 1982 marked a great step forward.

The improved Harrier came into service with the US Marines as the AV-8B in 1983 and with the RAF as the GR-5 a year later. More than one attempt was made by the US Administration in the late 1970s to kill the AV-8B. Happily Congress remained firm and the very valuable inter-Allied (US/UK) development of an advanced vertical/short take-off and landing (V/STOL) aircraft was saved.

Three major developments in the late 1970s and early 1980s emphasized the joint sea/air character of modern naval operations. First, the advent of ocean-ranging, high-performance bombers, such as the Soviet Backfire, armed with stand-off anti-ship missiles; secondly, the increased anti-submarine potency of long-range maritime patrol aircraft (LRMP), such as the Nimrod; and thirdly the much extended range of shore-based fighter protection of snipping and naval forces made possible by in-flight refuelling. The air capability of these forces was much improved also, at little extra cost, by the invention in Britain of the ski-jump flight deck, first fitted in HMS Invincible, often publicly described as an aircraft carrier but more correctly designated a cruiser. Its use considerably enhanced the combat performance of V/STOL Harrier aircraft and led to the adaptation of the hulls of container-type merchant ships to be escort carriers. Unfortunately only one of these, the British Traveller, was operational by mid-1985.

Anti-submarine warfare (ASW), always difficult, costly and complex, was made even more so by the introduction of an effective anti-sonar coating for submarines. This reduced the detection-range of active sonar dramatically, although its use for the precise location of submarines, in order to bring weapons to bear, remained virtually indispensable. Fortunately passive sonar, which is not affected by coatings on the submarines, had made great strides by 1985. It took three main forms. For very long-range detection, surveillance arrays, called SURTASS (surface towed-array sensor system), towed by ocean-going tugs, were used; destroyer/frigate types, and submarines on anti-submarine patrol, towed tactical arrays, called TACTASS (tactical towed-array sonar system); and LRMP aircraft were equipped with much improved passive sonobuoys. All these measures would impose considerable restrictions upon the mobility of hostile nuclear-powered attacking submarines.

Increasingly the systematic deployment of both active and passive sonars in ships, submarines and aircraft, and where possible on the seabed, had come to be seen as the basis of an effective counter to the submarine. Without the energetic application of information technology this could not have been achieved. By this means data obtained from any submarine contact, however fleeting, in any theatre of war, could rapidly be collated, after processing, with other submarine contact data and intelligence to be analysed, compared, and stored for further use. A continuously updated master submarine plot could thus be maintained, which would be accessible electronically to any NATO commander engaged in anti-submarine warfare, at any level, at sea or on shore. In addition, the exercise of command and control over the forces engaged in fast-moving and extensive air-sea combat would be much facilitated by the development and adoption of narrow-band, secure, voice communication equipment for tactical use.

Amongst the more important new weapons in the sea/air battle would be Stingray, the air-dropped or surface-ship-launched, high-performance homing anti-submarine torpedo; and the Captor, a mobile, homing, anti-submarine mine. Lynx, an ASW helicopter coming into service in the Royal Navy in the early 1980s, was a particularly useful guided weapons platform. The underwater-to-surface anti-ship missile Harpoon was another effective new weapon, in use in NATO submarines. Without these weapon systems the exiguous naval, naval air, and maritime air forces of NATO would have been at a severe disadvantage in trying to protect merchant shipping and seaborne military forces against all-out attack by the Soviet Navy and Soviet naval aviation.

The fighting power of the US Navy, and hence of NATO, had by mid-1985 been augmented by the first fruits of two remarkable procurement programmes, namely the building of the Ticonderoga-class cruisers, Aegis-equipped (Aegis is an integrated computer-controlled air defence system), and the conversion of the Second World War Iowa-class battleships into what, as a cross between battleships and carriers, were nicknamed ‘battliers’. The former were the first major surface warships to have been conceived since the microchip came in to join the missile, and could engage air, surface and underwater targets simultaneously at all ranges out to hundreds of miles; the latter, with an assorted armament of 16-inch guns and guided missiles, both surface-to-surface and surface-to-air, coupled with the survival capability conferred by vast size and heavy armour protection, provided the US Marines with devastating and reliable naval gunfire support, as well as air cover offered by V/STOL aircraft.

Finally, in a far from exhaustive survey, we come to Tornado, the multi-role combat aircraft (MRCA) combining the activities of a new strike/attack and reconnaissance aircraft, and in another variant an advanced interceptor, which though a joint Allied (UK/FRG/Italy) development of the first importance, more than once nearly came to grief in Allied budgeting. Happily Tornado too survived, even if its production rate was slower than it should have been. Its role is covered in more detail in the next chapter, which deals specifically with air warfare.

Military operations in Europe in August 1985 were to last for only three weeks. They would demand, none the less, optimum performance against opponents who were for the most part resolute and almost always well equipped. Penalties for inefficiency or irresolution on NATO’s part would be high. The war was not in the event long enough to extract the fullest value from developing techniques, nor even to draw the best dividends from material already in use and now becoming familiar. It was quite long enough to show where weaknesses lay. It was also long enough to demonstrate very clearly not only that non-nuclear defence is expensive (if it is to be effective), which was something that had been realized for a long time, but also that nuclear war can hardly be avoided unless the high cost of the alternative is met. The margin of NATO success would have been safer if the improved techniques and equipment, of which a few have been looked at here, had been available sooner, or in greater quantity, or if some which never came into service had not been strangled at birth. What the West had, and the way it was used, was just enough to prevent the catastrophic use of battlefield nuclear weapons with all its dreadful consequences. It might easily have been otherwise.

There is an old Roman saying: ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum’: if you want peace prepare for war.

It could be reworked, on lines more appropriate to the late twentieth century, to read: ‘If you want nuclear peace prepare for non-nuclear war: but be ready to pay the price.’

Chapter 6: The Air Dimension

The flexibility of air power is so far undisputed that people have tended rather to tire of the phrase. There is no escaping the fact, however, that it takes years for air forces to adapt to new fundamental concepts of operation. It takes at least ten years to develop a major air weapons system and air crew need four to five years after recruitment to become operationally effective in the more demanding roles. So it was not surprising that in the late 1970s, little more than a decade after the switch from a NATO strategy of massive retaliation to one of flexible response, the Allied air forces were still heavily involved with the technical and training tasks of developing a tactical capability to match possible battle scenarios of a war in central Europe under new politico-strategic terms of reference. Nor was it surprising that the reorganisation of the Soviet Air Force (SAF) on more flexible lines (described later in this chapter) was only beginning to come to fruition in the early 1980s.

In the United States Air Force (USAF) and the British Royal Air Force (RAF) the lion’s share of the air appropriations had throughout the 1970s been going to tactical forces. For the USAF this meant emphasis on contemporary fighters — the F-15 Eagle and Strike Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon — and A-10 Thunderbolt tank-busters. For the RAF it meant, among other things, Anglo-French Jaguars, the astonishingly versatile vertical/short take-off and landing (V/STOL) Harriers, F-4 Phantom fighters bought from the United States in the late 1960s and Buccaneers of a type that was a capable variant of an earlier naval aircraft. Most of these aircraft had been around for some years. By 1985 the RAF had had nearly fifteen years of experience in operating the V/STOL Harriers, for example, from dispersed sites around their base at Gutersloh well forward on the north German plain.

That dispersal was to serve them well when Gutersloh was attacked by Soviet Fencers on the morning of 5 August and not a single Harrier was on the airfield — although some RAF Puma helicopters and a charter aircraft evacuating civilian baggage were caught with heavy casualties. The Harrier pilots knew the area backwards and their association with I British Corps in the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG) was especially close. It was out of that association, and years of exercise together, that the British doctrine of counter-armour operations from the air had grown. The principle was to exploit the speed of the fixed wing aircraft to turn the flank of the enemy’s armoured echelons and then fly up or down to attack them some 10 to 20 kilometres in the rear, at the critical point where the armour would be fanning out from its line of march on to the battlefield. These tactics, which depended, like so much else, on air reconnaissance and rapid response, were to be vindicated in the war, and the air losses, though high, were sustainable for at least a while. This did not, in the event, take the immediate pressure off the troops at the forward edge of the battle area (the FEBA) when they were being forced back by the momentum and fire power of the enemy’s tanks. The effect would be felt later. In slowing momentum at the FEBA the army was to rely primarily on the long-range fire power of well-sited tanks and anti-tank guided weapons (ATGW), as well as ATGW helicopters hovering in ambush over dead ground or concealed in woodland. The Harriers and Jaguars would of course intervene directly at the FEBA when the clamour for help became especially loud and insistent. When they did so their losses would usually be high and the trade-off between tanks and aircraft could only be justified at times of the direst need.

The Anglo/German/Italian multi-role combat aircraft (MRCA) brought into service as the Tornado in its specialized long-range interceptor role in the UK, and its interdiction and counter-air role for the European continent, was a very recent and promising arrival. The German Air Force (GAF) was tied by political and geographical logic to the defence of its own air space, direct support of the land forces of CENTAG (Central Army Group) and NORTHAG, and interdiction and counter-air operations over enemy territory. By 1984 the GAF had received most of its Tornados and its air defence force was made up of F-4 Phantoms and a residue of F-104 Starfighters left over from the 1960s.

Each of the Allied air forces was backed up in some degree by air transport and helicopters. The helicopter was an unknown factor in operations on the scale and at the intensity that were to be experienced in the Third World War. In the event it played a versatile and often indispensable part in many roles, and notably so with the Warsaw Pact forces. But as had always been expected, losses were high and it remains an open question as to how long the helicopters could have remained on the battlefield in a longer war. The United States Army and Air Force, with Vietnam experience behind them, were to use large numbers in the gunship and logistic roles, with great skill and often with decisive local effect. In the first days of the war German and British helicopters were virtually to save the re-supply situation in NORTHAG’s rear area. The threat to soft-skinned vehicles from SAF armed reconnaissance aircraft had been seriously underestimated and the roads were blocked with wrecked trucks as well as civilian refugees. To compound the chaos and confusion the FEBA was falling steadily back to the west and it was chiefly through a non-stop shuttle of medium-lift helicopters that the ammunition and fuel would reach the front.

In a more offensive mode RAF Puma helicopters were to be used to move army anti-tank teams and their Milan weapons across the axes of the enemy’s advance to new positions as his thrust lines swung. When they achieved surprise and found good firing positions this proved an excellent way of keeping the anti-tank weapons in action against the enemy. The British Army’s Lynxes were effectively used in a similar way. But the British had always been hesitant about helicopters, partly because of their vulnerability, and partly because of their cost. By 1985 the British Army and the RAF had still to agree upon whether the helicopter should be regarded as an air or ground system. In consequence the capabilities of this remarkable, but admittedly vulnerable, machine were not always fully exploited in the battle in the north.

This was not true of the Soviet forces, which had always loved helicopters and built models for every kind of task and weapon. They were to use them as self-propelled guns flying above and ahead of their leading armour, as anti-tank platforms and as electronic counter-measure (ECM) stations. They even armed some with air-to-air weapons. Not surprisingly they fell easily and in large numbers to the US Patriot missiles (which were coming into service but were not yet plentiful) and the British Rapier and French Rolands and Sicas deployed by the NATO armies. Nevertheless, Allied ground force commanders at all levels would have cause to reflect that the need to strengthen their defences against marauding helicopters had not been fully appreciated.

Bringing offensive air support to bear on the enemy’s vulnerable articulation points in a fast-moving battle places a high premium on tactical air reconnaissance, with its rapid reporting and subsequent response. This was done in the main by interdictor or fighter aircraft operating with specialized crews and equipment. Over the sea, maritime aircraft patrolled against submarines and surface ships, with land-based helicopters working closer inshore. The whole Western European theatre was enclosed by the NATO air defence ground environment (NADGE), a radar warning system within which, in addition to the air fighters, there were arrays of ground-based surface-to-air missiles (SAM) for point and area defence. In the event the demand for air reconnaissance far exceeded the limited numbers of aircraft and crews available to carry it out. Whether there should have been more tactical reconnaissance squadrons must remain a moot point. More here would have meant less somewhere else. To give an idea of scale, it is worth noting that the USAF possessed approximately five times the number of aircraft of the whole of the RAF and GAF together.

On the broader front of intelligence — and that was very broad indeed — it had always been feared by the sceptics that in a major war the Allied intelligence system with its computerized ‘fusion centres’ would get clogged up — and it did. The input from satellites, airborne radars, electronic sensors, photography, and a host of other sources was vast and although the computers swallowed it all at great speed and spat it out again obligingly enough, they did so in an uncomprehending way. When war broke out intelligence centres had to be diluted with inexperienced or out-of-practice staffs and this was to hinder the speed at which the significance of bald data could be appreciated — as for example after the Gdansk incident, described at the end of this chapter, when the crucial information about the Soviet Air Force Cooker frequencies took forty-eight hours to reach the operating units that so desperately needed it. But the learning curve is steep in war and processing and evaluating times were to be greatly reduced in the first few days. Nevertheless, the human burden in handling the nearly overwhelming volume of data that the sensors, computers and communications could collect, store and deliver was tremendous and was to remain so throughout the war.

The British and German air force commanders had long seen that they would need an agile air-superiority fighter to replace their Phantoms in the 1980s, in order to counter the growing tactical air power that the Warsaw Pact would be able to bring to bear over a land battle in the Central Region. For political reasons this had to be tackled as a multi-national collaborative project and joint studies were started by the UK and the FRG with the French, who had a similar need. This well-intentioned collaboration got nowhere and the project was dropped. Differences in specifications and timescales could not be reconciled and the costs of the Tornado, which were getting badly out of control, squeezed out what little room was left in the forward defence budgets of the Federal Republic and the UK. The French kept their thoughts and their plans to themselves as the British and German staffs accepted that they would have to make do with their Phantoms for the rest of the decade. This was unfortunate but for the British there was at least the consolation that there was now room for a handsome increase of some eighty aircraft in the Harrier force. This would be welcome in the land battle but one result would be that Britain and Germany, if forced into a war in the 1980s, would be using fighter aircraft that were more than twenty years old in concept and design — the Tornado excepted — and that they would have no contemporary air-superiority fighter for the air battle.

The smaller northern NATO countries had managed their admittedly simpler resource problems rather better by plumping for the US F-16 Fighting Falcon tactical fighter in the mid-seventies. Although ‘buying American’ when there was so much drive behind the idea of developing the European aerospace industry had been a controversial decision, the war was to show that the Norwegian, Belgian, Dutch, and Danish air forces had made a sound and timely choice. Although the separate national air force orders were not large, the aggregate of more than 200 F-16 Fighting Falcon fighters, some with an enhanced night and bad-weather capability, together with the new Mirage 2000 of the French Air Force, did much to redress the RAF and GAF deficiencies in this area.

The French Air Force could not of course be included in the NATO order of battle — nor in any formal NATO plans or calculations. But its air defence was tied in with NADGE and military liaison with NATO was close. Although France had an interest in a new tactical fighter its need was not as pressing as that of Germany and Britain. The French Air Force had a satisfactory and well-assured programme for the early 1980s of replacing its earlier Mirage interceptors with the Mirage 2000 in both the tactical and interceptor roles. The interdiction and tactical attack roles were covered by the Anglo-French Jaguar. The French Air Force, with ample opportunities for dispersal and the advantage of operating on internal lines of communication, looked, and turned out to be, an effective, well balanced and modern force.

The British and German dilemma was critical. The turn of the decade saw a conservative government in Britain (as in the USA) committed to defence improvement. The United Kingdom soon ran into budgetary difficulties, while in Germany economic stringency and the soaring costs of the Tornado had already produced a virtual freeze on all air force procurement plans.

It was here that the Spinney Report made a quiet but telling entry. Franklin C. Spinney, an analyst, headed a research team in the USA tasked by the Pentagon with analysing the day-to-day availability of tactical aircraft. He unearthed some disquieting facts, not least that the reliability and serviceability factors for USAF front-line aircraft were far below what would be needed for intensive operations in war. Spinney concluded his astringent report in 1980 with the painful conclusion that ‘Our strategy of pursuing ever-increasing technical complexity and sophistication has made high technology solutions and combat readiness mutually exclusive.’

This conclusion, although unlikely to be universally true, chimed sufficiently well with the experience of the air forces of the larger powers to make the report very uncomfortable reading. Although obviously unwelcome, the report was taken seriously and had a significant impact on later events. Understandably, it was played down publicly and those few commentators in the media who latched on to what sounded like bad news missed the point that Spinney had been inveighing against complexity rather than high technology. There could be no question of air power turning its back on science and technology, for to do so would be to turn its back upon itself. In different ways, however, and sometimes for different immediate reasons, the Allied air forces started taking account of what Spinney had said.

While the big increases in the US defence appropriations for fiscal years (FY) 1980 and 1981, and their five-year projections, swung resources for the US AF back to the strategic elements (for well recognized politico-strategic reasons) they still left substantial room for improvements in the tactical forces. These took the form of further purchases of F-15 Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon fighters, more A-10 Thunderbolts and eight more KC-10 air refuelling tankers, which were to be so important for the trans-Atlantic reinforcement of Europe by fleets of tactical bombers and fighters. In FY 1983, perhaps with an eye to Spinney, no less than $3.6 billion was included for increased spare-part holdings and reliability improvements.

By the start of the war some of the US AF’s A-10 Thunderbolts had been given a bad-weather and night capability, but so had the Soviet SAM, so that any advantage to the A-10s was to some extent offset. When surprise was achieved, or the enemy defences were degraded, the Thunderbolts with their massive firepower could wreak havoc on the enemy’s armour, but in less favourable circumstances their losses would be almost too heavy to sustain. It was with some misgivings about the likely loss rate that the staffs of 4 Allied Tactical Air Force (ATAF) and CENTAG had approved, a year or so before the war, a programme of tactical trials to modify their existing co-ordination between the US Army anti-tank helicopters and the USAF Thunderbolts. The approved doctrine hitherto was for the helicopters, hovering in ambush, to open fire on the armour with their guided weapons for thirty seconds before the Thunderbolts came in, and then to pop up again to give the surviving tanks another thirty seconds’ worth when the Thunderbolts had finished. The idea came from the US Army Cobra helicopter pilots that their own effort might be better directed at the easily recognizable Soviet ZSU radar-controlled anti-aircraft guns and SAM vehicles which would be providing the tanks with anti-air protection. If they did that, it was argued, the Thunderbolts would have, if not an unrestricted, at least a much less fiercely opposed run at their targets. Ground force commanders were sceptical. The threat was from the tanks and there would never be enough anti-tank weapons in the right place at the right time. What there was should be directed at the main threat. The Thunderbolts might not arrive anyway.

The trials were promising, but without real action no one could be sure what would be best. In the event, adoption of the new tactics was at first cautiously limited to the new Hughes AAH-64 helicopters of 8 Aviation Combat Division of the US Army Air Corps at Finthen, Germany, working with USAF Thunderbolts deployed forward to Germany from their English base in East Anglia. The wooded knolls around Fulda, for example, were to give excellent cover to the ambushing helicopters with their Hellfire missiles, and the enemy’s defence vehicles were, as predicted, clearly visible against the squat Soviet T-72 tanks and BMP around them. With the ground defences at least temporarily stunned and degraded, the Thunderbolts, in relatively slow runs, could concentrate their fire with deadly effect against the tanks. Happily it had just been possible in the two years before the war to extend these tactics widely. Helicopter attack on tanks, sometimes in conjunction with A-10 Thunderbolts, on the lines worked out between the US Army Air Corps and the USAF were to be a frequent and powerful element everywhere along the Central Front.

The five-year projection in FY 1983 also provided for substantial increases in USAF flying hours, which had been cut back, just as they had been in European airforces, to dangerously low levels under budgetary pressures in the late 1970s. While this USAF programme was one to excite the envy of airmen across the Atlantic, much of its emphasis was nevertheless consistent with what Europe was having to do — namely, enhance and develop what already existed rather than insist in vain on new types.

The RAF was the only air force in the alliance to operate all the roles of air power (in the USA the maritime role was discharged by the US Navy Air Force). It is therefore instructive to look back at some of its problems in the five years before the war.

Although the British Government endorsed and generally adhered to the 3 per cent annual growth of defence spending in real terms agreed by the NATO Council in 1977, each year saw greater difficulty in containing the programme costs within the increased defence budget. Something always had to be dropped or deferred. A formidable ‘bow wave’ of unfulfilled operational requirements was being pushed ahead of the defence programme. As economic pressures increased, existing capabilities had then to be trimmed back because of rising running costs — a process that came to be termed rather bitterly in British defence circles ‘salami-slicing’. As matters got worse in the years of economic recession, flying hours and ground transport fuel were cut and (almost incredibly) officers and men were sent on leave to save money. The shoe, and more especially the flying boot, was pinching hard.

As in the USAF, the RAF had suffered a drain of experienced air crew in the second half of the seventies because pay and prospects compared badly with those to be found in civilian life in times of some economic buoyancy. Experience levels in the front-line squadrons began to cause anxiety, and subsequent cuts in flying and training, although effective enough in saving money on current account, were to cast a long and dangerous shadow over the force in the immediately following years. It fell to the British Defence Secretary to take a serious look at this declining situation in the summer of 1981 after yet another of a long series of what the British called ‘Defence Reviews’ — a well understood euphemism for further cuts in the defence programme. This time the review cost Britain 20 per cent of its naval surface fleet. As the Royal Navy was the major contributor to NATO’s Eastern Atlantic (EASTLANT) and Channel forces this in turn meant a cut of some 15 per cent in available surface escorts in the EASTLANT area.

The other two British services did not go unscathed but the RAF was at least authorized to keep in service two squadrons of Phantom fighters that would otherwise have been phased out. These were to augment the air defence of the United Kingdom and spoke for a proper recognition of the crucial importance of the British Isles in war as a forward base for United States land and air reinforcements and a rearward base for the air forces of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) should things go badly on the ground in Germany.

Explicitly the review laid stress on increasing weapon and logistic stocks. Implicitly it was an acknowledgement that if war should come to Europe it was likely to go on rather longer at the conventional level than previous planning and provisioning had been prepared to admit. If ever there should be good reasons for ‘going nuclear’, running out of ammunition and other war stocks after a few days should not be allowed to be among them.

The shock of the naval cuts was sharp but as the pain wore off it came to be seen that there was an inevitability about what had happened. At last realities were being faced, including the central one that the cost-growth of technology was going through the roof while most of the world was running out of money. Those who took any interest in current affairs knew that the strategic and theatre nuclear balance was unfavourable to the Alliance at the end of the 1970s. Until that imbalance was redressed by reductions on the Soviet side or new deployments on the Allied, the next six or seven years would indeed offer, in the now currently accepted phrase, a window of opportunity for the Soviet Union. The dangerous years were now upon the Alliance and its air forces had to take a long, cool look at the situation.

Using once more the British model, things would have been a lot worse but for the sound foundations laid in the seventies. Aircraft such as the Tornado, the Nimrod in its maritime and airborne early warning (AEW) roles, and the latest Blindfire all-weather version of the Rapier air defence missile, were among the leaders in the world league. Apart from having to keep the older aircraft in service much beyond what was originally planned, some other weaknesses lay in the increasing vulnerability to the developing Soviet Air Force of airfields in the UK and the shortage of alternative bases for dispersal — especially with the need to accept large reinforcements from the United States in war and the possibility of rearward redeployments of aircraft from the continent of Europe. Average experience levels in the front-line squadrons in some roles were uncomfortably low and the big gap for the rest of the decade was going to be the lack of a current-generation tactical fighter for operations over the forward area in Germany. It must also be said that ECM equipment, while all right as far as it went, was well behind the general state of this important art. Precious little extra resources would be forthcoming — that much was clear — and remedies would have to be sought by making better use of what there was or what was in near prospect.

Inevitably some good came from this enforced period of austerity. Some of the changes it imposed were radical. The opening of all ground branches not involved in direct combat duties to women, for example, tapped a reservoir of valuable recruits. Similarly, wider uses were found for auxiliaries and reservists of both sexes to considerable advantage. The USAF went further, in allowing women to be employed on flying duties. It was not long before this was extended to combat duties. In fact, it was a 29-year-old woman who was to lead the first offensive action from the United States in the Third World War. This deserves closer attention.

For some years the Soviet Navy had been using Conakry in Guinea, West Africa, as a turn-round base for their long-range Bear maritime reconnaissance aircraft and, occasionally also, Backfire bombers and supporting air tankers. In this way their aircraft could sweep down the length of the North Atlantic one day and up again the next. All of this was well observed by the US and British surveillance systems and it was naive if the Soviet Navy expected aircraft at Conakry to be unmolested in war. Nevertheless, on the evening of 4 August 1985 there were four Bears, two Backfires and a tanker on the airfield and the USAF responded promptly.

At midnight a mission of four B-52D bombers from the California Wing at March Air Force base took off from their war deployment base in Florida for a direct attack with 120 tons of high-explosive bombs under the command of Major Ed Lodge in the lead aircraft. They started their bomb runs to the target nine hours later from a clear blue sky. There was no fighter opposition and the Soviet SAM, which only started coming up as the bombing neared its end, were easily confused by the B-52s’ ECM. Runways, control facilities, hangars and fuel installations were taken as precision targets and systematically destroyed as the B-52s ploughed their furrows 10,000 metres up in the sky. Their success was total and the airfield was put out of use to such a degree that the Soviet Navy made no attempt to use it again.

Some of the wiser leaders in Africa saw the moral. Client states or surrogates would do well to ensure that their patron countries had the power and the reach to protect them from the dangers to which politics and geography might expose them. Guinea had painfully failed to foresee these risks.

Back at their base in Florida, as the citations for medals for the bomber crews were read out, the media were electrified to discover that the mission commander’s full name was Edwina Tinkle Lodge. She was among the first of a small group of young women who graduated from the US Air Force Academy and was accepted for training in the Military Airlift Command in the 1970s, where she had excelled as a pilot and aircraft captain. With a little help from her congressman, who was out for the women’s vote, she had been transferred to the B-52 Bomber Wing at March Air Force base which trained for a wide range of conventional bombing tasks. The Conakry raid was just one of them.

The example of the USAF was not generally followed in other Allied air forces even though there was an all-round shortage of experienced pilots stemming from the lean recruiting years of the 1970s. The critical difficulty lay in the restrictions placed on flying hours by governments for economic reasons. In due course corrective action had to be taken and in the RAF, for example, measures to keep experienced pilots longer on front-line duties helped to offset the dilution of experience which was exacerbated in the early 1980s by the need to cream off the best of the ‘fast jet-set’ to man the Tornado as it came into service. An important step in tackling that problem was when the British Government and its Treasury advisers were at last shaken out of the wrong-headed notion that there was an easy money-saving Midas touch in cutting back on flying and training. But it took a costly accident rate to persuade them of the folly of keeping an air force out of the air. A sustained drive was mounted to improve reliability of all equipment and to streamline the flow of logistics to the flight lines in the forward areas — wherever the fortunes of war might decide that they would be. This campaign paid off handsomely when the war came. Spinney’s report turned out to have had a very long tail.

What was done in the RAF was characteristic of the sort of effort and improvement programmes mounted by all the Allied air forces. The benefit of such measures came through steadily to the front line and evidence of this showed up in the rigorous evaluations under simulated war conditions imposed by independent multi-national NATO inspection teams. But certain innovations in the use of civil resources in Britain were of a rather special nature and deserve mention because they played a positive part in preserving and exploiting the strategic importance of the UK base within the Alliance.

In this connection it is worth recalling that in 1979 the United States Strategic Air Command (SAC) first publicly announced the intention to designate eighty B-52Ds in support of NATO forces. The bomb bay of the B-52Ds had been enlarged in 1967 to carry up to 70,000 lb of conventional free-fall bombs and in 1977 the aircraft were given further structural and avionic improvements to extend their operational life and to enhance their conventional bombing capability. In September 1978, B-52s from 7 Bomber Wing at Cars-well, Texas, participated for the first time in the NATO exercise ‘Cold Fire’. Thereafter, they trained more and more frequently in European conditions.

On some occasions in their training they flew directly across the Atlantic, simulated attacks on ‘hostile’ forces in Western Europe and returned to their bases in Texas and California with the assistance of air-to-air refuelling. By 1981, regular deployments were being made to forward operating bases such as Brize Norton or Marham in England. Tactical response was thus being quickened without the political implications of permanent basing. But this exacerbated the nagging problem that air bases in the United Kingdom were becoming heavily overcrowded, and therefore increasingly attractive as targets to an enemy. While regular SAC deployments to Lajes in the Azores, which began in 1983, eased the overcrowding to some extent, the problem remained.

Although there had been hundreds of airfields in Britain by the end of the Second World War, by 1982 there were less than fifty in the hands of the RAF and the USAF — the latter having long maintained both strategic and tactical wings in the UK. Recovering the old wartime airfields was out of the question and for some years the RAF had been eyeing the civil airports with their modern runways and ground facilities. But nothwithstanding goodwill from national and municipal authorities, commercial, constitutional and communications problems had always stood in the way of their military use. By 1984, however, twenty-three airports had been earmarked and were exercised as satellites of main RAF and USAF bases. The rationalization of military and civil communications had been the main hurdle to clear; once that was done, and with a wider public appreciation of the threat to the country, the other difficulties fell away. The plan was to use these civil airports as dispersed sites for flights of up to eight aircraft and thereby distribute the precious air eggs in that many more ground baskets.

The difficulty lay in knowing how to sustain operations without technical facilities and logistic stocks. To ease the problem the airmen’s eyes had been resting on the civilian helicopter fleet which had grown to more than a hundred aircraft around the North Sea oil industry. The operating companies were very willing to play their part in national plans and readily agreed to a scheme, in emergency, of attaching up to four of their aircraft to each of the main RAF and USAF bases so as to form a logistic chain to the newly earmarked satellite airfields. The plan was exercised a few times before the war and when the real need came the civilian helicopter crews performed herculean tasks in ferrying technicians, weapon reloads, test equipment and spare parts. They did this by day and by night without regard to weather, often plying between airfields under missile attack. Hardened air crew that they were, some were heard to comment, with a nice taste for understatement, that it was quite relaxing after the rigours of flying to the North Sea rigs in winter.

A signal success came to these helicopters in the first days just before and after the outbreak of war as the ‘air bridge’ was swung across the Atlantic and US Boeing 747s and Lockheed C-5s were landing up to 300 troops in central England every four minutes. The commercial helicopters ferried thousands of troops and hundreds of tons of their supplies from the airfields to the railheads and east coast ports. This eased what threatened to become an unmanageable congestion on the roads and railways and cut vital hours off the reinforcement time from the United States to the continent of Europe.

None the less, what the Commander Allied Air Forces Central Europe (COMAAFCE) had described in 1982 as ‘the Achilles heel’ of his Command, the insufficient availability of stocks of fuel, ordnance, spares and other requirements on dispersal airfields, continued to give concern. Co-located operational bases (COB), from which both USAF and RAF aircraft could operate, alleviated the difficulty. It was never quite to disappear. The danger that reinforcement aircraft, together with those withdrawn from further forward, would arrive in such numbers as to swamp support facilities remained.

First priority in the British dispersal plan went to the large air tankers, the AEW aircraft, and the Nimrod anti-submarine patrol aircraft, all of which had key roles but existed only in small numbers. They were anyway far too big to be protected in the hardened shelters which had been built with NATO common funds at most of the operational airfields; but the smaller RAF aircraft like the Tornados, Buccaneers and Jaguars, as well as the Hawk jet-trainers in their secondary air-defence role, were also thinned out and sent to the dispersed sites when it looked as if the main bases might become too hot to hold them.

By 1984 British Airways Boeing 757s had been modified to carry out refuelling which was to be invaluable when the almost insatiable demand for air tanking started in the first hours of the war. Sadly a proposal by British Airways in the late 1970s that their new jumbo-jet cargo carriers should be built with floors strengthened for military loads got bogged down in a bureaucratic argument about who would pay for the airline’s payload penalty in peacetime. The Western allies were in consequence denied a very badly needed addition to their airlift for military vehicles.

And so it was that in these sorts of ways, and with a very free exchange of ideas within NATO, the Allied air forces made the best of the seven lean years before the war. But while their attention was turned to improving current effectiveness, rather than to bidding for solutions in the future, technology and its opportunities were of course not standing still.

The airborne warning and control system (AWACS) was arguably the biggest ‘force multiplier’ of any recent developments and its impact on the war exceeded the expectations of even the most ardent proponents of its introduction to USAF service in 1977. The E-3A Sentry aircraft, based on Boeing 707 airframes, were readily distinguished from other 707s by the 30-foot diameter radome enclosing the radar and other antennae by which the aircraft was able to exercise much of the capability which put it so far ahead. An illustration of how it worked is worth giving.

In July 1985 the eighteenth and last of the E-3A Sentries assigned to NATO arrived at the German Air Force base at Geilenkirchen, near the Dutch border, to join the newly-formed European NATO squadron. The last of the thirty-four aircraft retained in the USA had joined 552 Airborne Warning and Control Wing at Tinker Air Force Base near the city of Oklahoma earlier in the year. Crews on this Wing had amassed considerable experience on regular deployments to Keflavik in Iceland, Ramstein in Germany, Cairo West, Dhahran in Saudi Arabia, and in South Korea and Japan. The crews of the NATO squadron, drawn from eleven Allied countries, had not travelled so far afield but had become very familiar with the airspace of central Europe, Norway, Italy and Turkey.

By the beginning of 1985 a regular surveillance pattern had been established in the Central Region of Europe. One Sentry from the NATO squadron was always aloft near Venlo on the German-Dutch border; a second from the USAF flew over Ramstein; and a third, also from the NATO squadron, patrolled to the west of Munich in Bavaria. Stand-by aircraft were held on fifteen minutes’ readiness. Their racetrack patterns were flown at over 25,000 feet. The serviceability of Sentry, based on a well-tried type of aircraft, had always been better than that experienced by new generations of aircraft and by 1985 COMAAFCE could confidently expect a daily 80 per cent serviceability rate from both the USAF and the NATO units. Moreover, with a four-man flight crew, additional to the thirteen men manning the equipment, extensive crew space, in-flight cooking and in-flight refuelling, each Sentry could extend its normal six-hour patrol time by several hours if necessary, which afforded great advantages.

From 1983 onwards, Sentries in both NATO and USAF squadrons had been built with almost identical equipment. The original computer speed had been increased threefold and the storage capacity fivefold. The Sentry computer could now process an incredible 1.25 million operations per second and, if necessary, could communicate with up to 98,000 air and ground users by the joint tactical information distribution system (JTIDS), a digital communications system resistant to ECM. Not surprisingly, in the early years of deployment the technical capacity of the aircraft had tended to outrun the imagination of those responsible for its operation, while there were many who considered its introduction into service premature and its technology potential excessive. In 1981, however, a separate subordinate NATO AWACS Command had been established at Maisieres near Brussels and an Allied staff had worked steadily both to exploit its functions more fully and to integrate Sentry operations with those of the British AEW Nimrod.

Sentry’s first and most obvious role was to look out for intruders into NATO airspace. Hitherto, low flying Floggers or Fencers could be detected only at some 30 miles’ distance by the scattered mobile forward radars close to the inner German border (IGB). Now that aircraft at any height could be clearly identified at least 200 miles away, and if flying at 5,000 feet or above, 300 miles away or more, the practical implications for NATO’s air defences were startling. Warsaw Pact aircraft could be observed taking off from bases anywhere in Eastern Germany, for example, or from others half way across Czechoslovakia, or as they were flying close above the Baltic waves beyond Bornholm. Aircraft climbing to a high-transit flight level could be detected in eastern Poland and all the way across Eastern Europe as far as the Soviet border. Instead of three or four minutes’ warning of a surprise attack, Sentry could give an air defence sector headquarters, like that at Brockzeitel not far west of Dusseldorf, up to thirty minutes’ warning.

That was not all. Additional wiring had been asked for in the eighteen NATO aircraft to incorporate electronic support equipment, the peacetime euphemism for what was required to gather electronic intelligence. In 1983, after extensive debate in the Western Alliance, funding had been provided for this equipment to be installed. Thereafter, for the next two years, data on Warsaw Pact command and control procedures, surveillance radars, SAM guidance wavelengths and even individual Warsaw Pact aircraft call signs and pilot voices had been assiduously collected and fed into the system’s data banks. Indeed, the problem was not the accumulation of data, but the constant pressure on over-stretched NATO ground staff to ensure that it was all categorized, processed and fed into the seemingly limitless capacity of the new generation of computers. Perhaps, as some thought, there was too much of it all.

The Warsaw Pact, of course, was well aware of Sentry’s potential, publicized proudly as it was in the regular editions of Western military aviation journals. And, indeed, they had in 1982 deployed their own IL-76C Cooker to perform much the same function.

Under Sentry’s long shadow, the Warsaw Pact air forces had tightened signals discipline considerably, sought to decrease their air crews’ dependence on ground control and accelerated the introduction of their own digital secure communications links. Increasingly, Warsaw Pact squadrons were deployed back to central USSR for periods of intensive operational training unobserved, but there was now no way to maintain squadron effectiveness in Eastern Europe, or exercise their surface-to-air defences, without adding to Sentry’s data bank. There had been, not surprisingly, a determined attempt by the Soviet Union to mobilize public opinion in the FRG against the modification of the Geilenkirchen base to accommodate these aircraft. This had failed in 1982 in the face of patient and well-reasoned explanations by the Federal German Government of Sentry’s enormous contribution to deterrence. One thing was sure. Quick and violent counter-measures against the system could certainly be counted on if war came.

In the spring of 1985 the Sentries began to detect small but significant changes in Warsaw Pact air activity. SU-24 Fencers had been stationed in eastern Poland for four years, steadily replacing both MiG-21 Fishbeds and, latterly, early marks of SU-17 Fitters. The bulk of the Fencer squadrons, however, had remained at bases in the eastern Ukraine, in the Kiev Military District, or the Baltic Military District. In January 1985 regular rotations of the USSR-based squadrons began first to eastern and then to western Polish airfields. Sentry quickly detected the changing voices and call signs of the new crews, who were obviously very experienced. In May and June reconnaissance sorties by Foxbat G, equipped with sideways-looking and synthetic-aperture radars, and digital information instantaneous downlinks, were greatly increased along the IGB and were duly noted by the Sentries.

Throughout the spring the weapons range at Peenemunde in the GDR was used round the clock by Flogger Gs and Js during the day and by Fencers at night. Sentry could track both medium-level approaches to the range and the actual ground-attack procedures. This information was added to all the other indicators available to the Western allies which suggested steadily increasing Warsaw Pact military activity.

In mid-July the major Warsaw Pact exercise began which was to be used as cover for mobilization.

By 2359 hours on 3 August, the Sentries had watched five regiments of Hind E gunships deploy, as part of the ‘exercise’, to forward bases 30 miles from the IGB. Two regiments of SU-25 Flatfoot ground-attack aircraft had returned to their major bases north of Leipzig, which placed them in range of both the area around Fulda and the north German plain. More significantly, the intensity of the jamming now rapidly increased. Only spasmodic attempts had ever been made to jam the Sentries’ surveillance radar before. Triangulation from the three Sentries constantly on station quickly pinpointed the sources of the jamming as eight AN-12 Cubs operating in their ECM mode, cruising some 100 kilometres beyond the IGB. However, because of the narrow beam width of the Westinghouse AN/APY-1 radar installed in the E-3A Sentries and its low side-lobe characteristics, the effect on the AWACS’ radar screens was negligible and their effectiveness remained high.

The Sentries were not the only targets for the jammers: below and in front of them were the inviting targets of the NATO ground radars — static, still in process of modernization, and highly vulnerable both to direct jamming and to side-lobe penetration. One after another these reported to their sector commanders that their medium- and high-level surveillance was becoming impaired, despite rapid switching through the frequencies available to them. The effectiveness of Soviet Click jammers, long suspected, was now being confirmed.

It was at 0315 hours on 4 August, 25,000 feet over Ramstein in the Federal Republic, that the radar operators of the Sentry aircraft E-3A 504826 of 965 Squadron, detached from Tinker to USAFE (United States Air Force Europe), first saw twelve blips appear on their screens, crossing eastern Poland at 35,000 feet, apparently from the central Ukraine on a westerly heading, at a speed of just under Mach 2. Within seconds they were also spotted by the Sentries over Venlo and west of Munich and identified as Backfires. All data were flashed immediately down to COMAAFCE’s battle staff. The Ramstein, Wildenrath (RAF) and Neuburg (FRG) battle flights were immediately scrambled and climbed away to their intercept positions, still well west of the IGB. The Backfires crossed the Polish frontier into the GDR but then broke formation and in six pairs fanned out on headings in an arc towards Hamburg in the north and Bavaria in the south. All twelve were maintaining radio silence.

Then, while still 50 miles inside Warsaw Pact territory, they banked steeply and within a few seconds one after another inexplicably turned back towards Poland. The senior controller in 504826 began to express his surprise, speaking in a somewhat relaxed tone on his secure encoded downlink to his colleagues in the bunker 30,000 feet below. As they listened his voice suddenly stopped, and at the same moment the steady, friendly IFF (identification friend or foe) signal from 504826 which was being received by the two other Sentries abruptly disappeared. As subsequent events showed, even if the USAF crew had heard the warning shouted by the Dutch ECM operator in the Venlo Sentry there was little they could have done.

It should be recalled that one important modification to the original E-3A Sentry had been the fitting of hard points under the wings and fuselage which could carry chaff dispensers and air-to-air defensive weapons. Chaff comprised strips of metal foil exactly cut to simulate and amplify a given wavelength. A cloud of these would give the same response as an emitter on the same wavelength, and thus act as a decoy to attract a homing missile. At the same time as the electronic support measure (ESM) refit in 1983, and in a rare example of refusal to spoil a ship for a ha’p’orth of tar, NATO had also funded provision of these chaff dispensers. The USAF had taken a little longer to be convinced that the E-3A might not always see its attacker and be able to avoid him. Consequently, not all their AWACS carried this kind of protection. It was the misfortune of the crew from 965 Squadron that their aircraft that night had not yet been modified.

Lieutenant De Groot in the Venlo Sentry saw on his screen the Backfires suddenly turn for home. He guessed at once why. They would use their stand-off anti-radiation missiles, which had a range of 150 miles, and these would home on the radars of the Sentries and destroy them. Without waiting for any order from his commander he hit the chaff dispenser key and simultaneously shouted his warning. The well-drilled Italian ECM operator in the Bavarian Sentry heard the warning and immediately reacted in the same way. A few seconds later each of these two Sentry aircraft was rocked violently as Soviet anti-radiation missiles exploded harmlessly several hundred feet behind and below them in the cloud of drifting metal foil. The third Sentry, unprovided with chaff, was less fortunate. The missile struck. The seventeen US AF crewmen of the E-3A Sentry of 965 Squadron, far from their Oklahoma home base, became the first airman casualties of the Third World War. The wreckage of the aircraft fell over a wide area in the woods of the upper Mosel valley. The missile had ripped off the radome from the stricken Sentry’s mainframe and the aircraft had disintegrated.

The Backfires, however, had attacked not just the three Sentries. Each Backfire probably carried at least two anti-radiation missiles. They also destroyed six ground surveillance radars and damaged two others between Hanover and Mannheim. Yet, because of the rigid rules of engagement imposed by NATO on its air forces, they were able to return unscathed to their Ukrainian bases. The war had begun, but NATO airspace had not yet ‘officially’ been violated.

The crews in the two remaining Sentries had no time either to applaud the initiative of the Dutch officer or to grieve for their lost colleagues. On the encoded voice-link the clipped tones of the British duty commander, the air vice-marshal acting as deputy in COMAAFCE’s bunker, instructed both aircraft to adjust their patrol racetracks to cover the gap left by the Ramstein E-3A until the relief aircraft could come on station. The Venlo Sentry turned south, the Bavarian north; surveillance across the IGB was uninterrupted. At Geilenkirchen, the NATO Sentry on fifteen minutes’ stand-by was scrambled; at 0329 hours it climbed away, turning south to replace 504826.

The wisdom of placing all such high-value assets under the direct command of COMAAFCE was thus clear from the outset of the war. There was now much to survey. As the Backfires turned for home, swarms of blips began to appear on the Sentries’ radar screens, as, in accordance with well-publicized doctrine, the longer-range offensive Warsaw Pact aircraft prepared to punch through NATO’s air defences in the area already partially blinded by the Backfire attack. Five years before, NATO forces would have had no way of identifying the main axes of the air threat until it struck across the IGB. Now, the Sentry controllers could watch the formations massing in much the same way as forty-five years previously hazy RAF radars had watched the Luftflotten assemble over the Pas-de-Calais. But in 1985 the controllers were assisted by the micro-processor. Warsaw Pact jamming was largely filtered and almost entirely limited to two or more azimuth bearings on the narrow sweeping beam. The keyboards rippled and details of aircraft type, height, speed, heading and numbers were flashed by the computers to the fighter controllers below. The information was there in abundance.

Throughout the 1970s Soviet air power had steadily increased in strength as a new generation of Flogger, Fitter, Fencer and Foxbat fighters and Backfire bombers, supplemented by the Hip and Hind helicopters and the Cock, Candid and Camber transports entered service. In the early 1980s the Soviet Union had flexed these new muscles in several parts of the world. Military strength had been unequivocally used to prepare a more favourable political situation in Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. All these efforts had not been uniformly successful but the long reach and hitting power of Soviet aircraft had everywhere become more and more apparent.

Western military concern at what was clearly an attempt to close the gap in quality between Warsaw Pact and NATO aircraft was tempered by reassuring knowledge of several serious and apparently endemic weaknesses in the Soviet Air Force itself. Effective air power demands far more than improved aircraft. It must have highly-trained and dedicated people, a professional and complex maintenance system, flexible and resilient command and control organization, and above all the inspiration of imagination and initiative in both practice and theory. The SAF, on the other hand, appeared to be handicapped by the quality of its largely conscript ground crews, by low morale and corruption (as described in such detail in the published accounts of evidence from the defecting Soviet airman Lieutenant Belenko who landed his MiG-25 Foxbat B in Japan in September 1976), by a rigid command structure which hampered the flexible use of air power and by a social and political system in which the encouragement of initiative and imagination was hardly prominent.

Beginning in late 1982, however, shreds of evidence began to reach the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the Pentagon and West European intelligence centres which seemed to suggest that the Soviet Union was making determined efforts to eradicate some of these weaknesses and that, despite the deadening effect of the Party bureaucracy on all levels of the SAF, it was having some success. During 1983 clearer evidence began to emerge which ultimately was to compel the NATO air forces to revise their overall estimate of the potential effectiveness of their Warsaw Pact opponents.

As early as 1979 the SAF had attempted to improve the quality of maintenance by introducing new warrant officer ranks and by offering improved pay and promotion incentives to encourage conscript ground crew to extend beyond their mandatory two years’ service. By 1983, as the Soviet colleges of science and technology continued to produce more graduates each year, there was in the conscripted manpower of the SAF an increased proportion of highly-skilled young men. Moreover, as the Soviet Union came to lay greater emphasis on conventional war-fighting methods, previously very much in second place to nuclear doctrines, the pay of SAF ground crew was raised to match that in the nuclear-armed Soviet Strategic Rocket Force (SRF), hitherto the pre-eminent branch of the Soviet armed services. Living and messing conditions were improved and though still far below levels demanded in the West were nevertheless much higher than those of the majority of conscripts in their civilian life. The retention rate of ground crew began to rise, their status began to improve, and during 1985 the serviceability rate of SAF front-line squadrons in Eastern Europe began to show a steady but marked improvement.

The second cause for unease concerned changes in SAF operational procedures. Throughout the 1970s, although the SAF re-equipped with aircraft able to carry three times the payload over twice the range of their predecessors, its squadrons tended to fly the same rigidly controlled, highly predictable patterns of attack and defence which had been evident for thirty years. From 1979 onwards, however, articles began to appear in Red Star and some air force journals, purporting to be written by senior officers, which openly commended pilots who had shown initiative in departing from prearranged plans and procedures which, in exercises, they had found to be inadequate. No such noises were heard from the Red Army, which was carrying on in the old familiar straitjacket.

The causes of these changes in the SAF can now be seen more clearly. To operate the Fencer under conditions of inflexible command and control would undermine its long-range potential. Moreover, the considerable investment which the Soviet Union had made in computer-assisted command and control procedures was beginning to pay dividends in easing the enormous airspace management problems created by the large-scale SAM deployment in Eastern Europe. Hitherto, rigid control had not only been politically desirable but it had been adequate for short-range offensive operations and air defence, and had enhanced flight safety in airspace shared at many heights with SAM and guns. There was another factor. Soviet air power doctrine assumed the application of large numbers over very large areas. In the Red Army, with a similar basic philosophy, initiative was expected not so much from a lieutenant as from the commanders at not less than divisional level. In the SAF the operational concept required control and command to be exercised at a level appropriate to the reach and hitting power of the aircraft concerned. Moreover, in pre-planned offensive operations of a kind envisaged by the Warsaw Pact, conformity on the part of individual air crew to the plan had seemed more important than an ability to exercise initiative in adversity. This was the exact opposite of what was to be found in the numerically inferior NATO air forces.

By 1985, however, it was apparent that far-reaching reorganization of command and control in the SAF had been completed. The general staff now controlled the heavy bombers, Bears and Bisons, and the medium bombers, Badgers and Backfires, as two virtually independent air armies. They could, therefore, be directed not only against targets in Europe but in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and, if necessary, the Far East. The shorter-range Floggers and Fencers were controlled at the lower theatre headquarters level, while the fixed-wing aircraft with the shortest range, the SU-17 Fitter Js and SU-25s and remaining MiG-21 Fishbeds, stayed under control of frontal aviation headquarters. Below them, the close air support Hip and Hind helicopters were controlled by the armies. The net result of this reorganization had been to match the level of command with the combat radius of the aircraft, thereby ensuring greater flexibility and concentration of force in relation to the demands of tactical control and rapid response. As has been indicated, however (and we shall be seeing some lively evidence of this in chapter 11), there was room for difference of opinion on what was really meant by flexibility.

At the same time as the command infrastructure had been revised, Soviet operational training also began to approach more closely the potential of the new aircraft. The MiG-23 Flogger G, hitherto flown only as an interceptor, was fitted with underwing rails to take air-to-surface rockets. Flogger squadrons in Eastern Europe began to assume multi-role commitments. Periodically they would deploy to armament camps in central USSR to develop new ground-attack techniques away from the prying eyes of Sentry. On their return, each would demonstrate a marked improvement in weapon delivery. More ominously, exercises involving the co-ordination of three or more air regiments increased in frequency. In the 1970s it had not been uncommon for a squadron of ground-attack Fitters, for example, to be given top cover by a squadron of MiG-21 Fishbeds. By 1984, Flogger Gs or Js could be escorted by entire regiments of other Flogger Gs. Some Western military analysts had expected to see such escort provided by the most recent addition to the MiG-25 family: the two-seat Foxbat F with its improved pulse-doppler radar and long-range air-to-air missiles (AAM). But its basic airframe still made it quite unsuitable for the low-level air-superiority role and its additional weight had actually restricted its combat radius still further. It therefore remained on traditional PVO Strany (Air Defence Force) combat patrols working with IL-76C Cooker, the SAF’s new AEW aircraft developed from the Candid transport.

The advent of Cooker had long been forecast in the West, but even when it began to enter service in 1982 very little was known about its operational capabilities. Its trials and development flying had been carried out in Central Asia out of range of most Western electronic intelligence (ELINT) agencies. It was well known that Soviet radar engineering was in many respects as good as that in the West and that the Candid airframe could provide ample space for bulky Soviet equipment which had not yet fully benefited from the microprocessor revolution. It was possible, therefore, that Cooker’s radar range was similar to that of NATO’s AWACS. If that were so, and if it had similar powers to identify low-flying aircraft and communicate instantaneously with ground and air defences, the task of NATO aircraft attacking deep behind Warsaw Pact lines would become much more difficult.

By January 1985 twenty-four Cookers had come into service. Ten were based in south-eastern Poland out of range of most NATO aircraft, strategically located to fly standing patrols either up towards the Baltic or south-east across Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria. Others patrolled former report lines across the northern USSR. A third detachment operated in the Black Sea, Caucasus and Caspian areas, while three were regularly deployed to the Chinese border regions. The Soviet crews were apparently well trained and well disciplined. Within a very short time NATO specialists were convinced that Cookers were not using anything like all their frequency range or transmitting power while on routine patrols over Eastern Europe. These suspicions were heightened by regular deployments of individual aircraft back to central USSR with two or more regiments of Foxbats and Flogger Gs. Satellite information was sketchy but was sufficient to indicate that the SAF was holding regular exercises similar to the NATO Red Flag series in Nevada run by the USAF in which Soviet air opposition was realistically simulated. In these, Cooker appeared to be locating several low-flying aircraft and either vectoring interceptors directly on to them or relaying target information to ground control units. But unless the full extent of Cooker’s frequencies could be identified, and its operating ranges established, comprehensive ECM could not be prepared by NATO. Not for the first time, however, at least one of NATO’s problems was to be dramatically reduced as a result of endemic weaknesses within the Soviet system, which in this case culminated in what became known as the Gdansk incident. The account of it given below appeared in the December 1986 number of the RUSI Journal published by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, London.

4 On 27 July 1985 an IL-76C Cooker of the AEW 16 Guards Regiment of the SAF climbed away on a routine evening patrol from its main operating base south-east of Krakow. The aircraft captain, Major Anatoly Makhov, was not in the best of moods. Just before the take-off his second pilot had been replaced by the regimental political commissar, Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Gregorian. In 1980 the Political Directorate had ordered their regimental officers to show greater affinity with the operational crews. Gregorian, who had earned his pilot’s wings several years before but was now known to hate flying, took care to ensure that he had at least one signature each month in his log book to lend authenticity to figures which could easily be falsified. The power and influence of a regimental commissar were far more attractive to him than the dull routine of Cooker patrols and he did as few of those as he could.

This particular Cooker patrol began uneventfully. It was observed by the Venlo Sentry to reach its routine patrol track north of Bydgoszcz, cruising at slightly more than 350 knots at 30,000 feet. Then abruptly it was observed to lose height and, heading north towards Gdansk, it disappeared below Sentry’s long-range surveillance reach. It was several days before NATO air intelligence was able to reconstruct the events of the next few hours but, happily, there were good secondary sources.

Major Makhov was determined to be as courteous as possible to the Colonel who, after all, could make life very miserable for him. But as the Cooker levelled off on its patrol circuit, Gregorian was clearly losing interest. He took out from his brand-new flying suit a well-thumbed paperback novel which, Makhov was interested to note, was a lurid example of highly illegal Estonian pornography from Tallin. Relieved, the Major relaxed and concentrated on the undemanding job of flying the Cooker on a predetermined track, height and speed while his navigator busily cross-checked their position with the senior fighter controller in the cabin behind them.

Then, for no apparent reason, the red fire-warning light from No. 2 port inner engine began to flash on the main instrument panel in front of Makhov at the same moment as the warning hooter blasted in his headset. Makhov was no beginner, with 2,500 hours on IL-76 aircraft behind him. He swiftly reached down, closed the No. 2 throttle and watched the flashing red light. It stayed on. So he reached across and flicked the No. 2 fire extinguisher switch, at the same time closing the No. 2 stopcock. The flashing light disappeared and the hooter stopped.

Major Makhov noticed, with amusement, that an ashen-faced Colonel Gregorian in the right-hand seat was staring with stupefaction at the panel. But Makhov had no time to enjoy the commissar’s discomfiture. Even as he began to call to his flight engineer to check the port wing visually, No. 1 port outer light flashed and the hooter blared a second time. This time he could sense the tension on the flight deck as he swiftly killed this engine too and released the No. 1 extinguisher.

“No visual signs of fire,” reported the flight engineer.

Makhov had no doubts about his ability to handle Cooker on the two starboard engines only and he strongly suspected that the problem was simply an electrical fault. But the Cooker carried fourteen men without parachutes who were depending on him; his professional competence was on the line.

“Where is our nearest field?” he asked the navigator.

“Gdansk Civil,” came the nervous reply, “Forty kilometres on heading 355.”

Gregorian picked this up on intercom and began to shout objections to the use, without authority, of a Polish civil airfield. Makhov ignored him and switched to the international distress frequency. In quiet but good English he began to describe his emergency and his intention to make a straight-in two-engined approach to Gdansk Civil Airport. He then switched back to his own operational channel and informed his base of the situation.

In fact, the next few minutes, though tense, were comparatively uneventful. Major Makhov again demonstrated his professional skill by putting the heavy Cooker down without mishap. As he taxied towards the main apron in front of the terminal building he called the tower to arrange a guard on the plane while the port wing and engines were examined. He knew from long experience that even if it had only been an electrical fault, his Soloviev turbo-fans would need flushing from the effects of the fire extinguishers and the Cooker could be on the ground for several hours. But this was a civil airport; there were no Soviet soldiers or airmen stationed there. Since the troubles began in 1980, all Soviet military personnel in Poland had kept as far as possible a low profile, restricted to military airfields or barracks. To the conscript crewmen of the Cooker the bright lights of the civilian terminal looked very inviting. Colonel Gregorian had recovered his composure sufficiently to begin thinking about the possibilities of the duty-free shop.

The Cooker was marshalled to a halt some 30 yards beyond the last Polish civil airline TU-134 at the end of the dispersal area. As the white-overalled ground crew of the Polish state airline LOT pushed the trolley ladder up. against the forward door, a dozen armed Polish soldiers fanned out around the aircraft and the Gdansk Aeroflot agent hurried across the tarmac towards it. The conversations that followed were overheard by both Lot ground crew and the guards, but by what means they were so quickly relayed to London has not yet been made known.

Colonel Gregorian described to the agent and the senior Polish NCO the emergency they had come through and how single-handed he had overcome the panic of the rest of the crew and brought this valuable aircraft safely to earth. Major Makhov went pale and was clearly very angry. He said nothing until one of the Polish guards, in quite good Russian, asked him what had really taken place on the flight deck, and was told.

What exactly happened in the next hour is not public knowledge. What is known is that just before the outbreak of war, details of Cooker’s IFF codes, operating frequencies, transmitters and receivers, all of absolutely critical importance, reached the Radar and Signals Research Establishment at Malvern in England for analysis by British scientists. According to press reports at the time, the crew of a Polish LOT TU-134 made a scheduled run from Gdansk to Copenhagen late on the evening of 27 July and the crew then asked for political asylum in Denmark. Passengers on that flight described how Soviet airmen led by a portly, noisy Colonel were allowed into the duty-free shop of the Gdansk terminal and also said that as they were taking off they saw Soviet troops replacing Polish guards and Soviet uniformed ground crew taking over from the Polish engineers in their overalls who had been examining the port wing of a Soviet military aircraft near the front of the terminal. Whether there were disaffected men among the Polish guards, or among the ground crew, or whether Major Makhov allowed his anger at the bragging behaviour of the Colonel to distract his attention from his aircraft for a few minutes we do not know. But an elderly Polish cloakroom attendant, born in the Ukraine, alleged that while he was on duty one night just before war broke out an SAF Colonel was in the lavatory in the terminal building when a highly excited Soviet airman rushed in.

“The operating and maintenance manuals have gone from the aircraft!” he is alleged to have said.

His excitement was understandable. These were classified documents of high importance. Their loss was a serious matter. He was shortly followed into the lavatory by a grim-faced Major. Unaware that the attendant could understand Russian, the three men argued furiously for several minutes about whether and how the manuals could have disappeared and who was responsible.

Then the Colonel said: “Understand one thing: NO documents have been removed from my aircraft. If it is necessary to replace certain damaged manuals on our return to base, you will do so; but if one word of this reaches the ears of the regimental commander I will personally ensure that every member of this crew sees nothing but a Gulag for the rest of his life.”

History, therefore, had almost repeated itself. In 1939 the Poles had given Enigma to the West; in 1985 they seemed to have passed over the secrets of Cooker. Because of a political commissar’s fear of his superiors, and the airmen’s fear of the commissar, it looks as if the loss was never reported. By 3 August NATO commanders began to receive complete operational and technical data on Cooker. This did not get down to squadrons for another forty-eight hours, which was only just in time.

Chapter 7: The Warsaw Pact

Soviet hopes and aspirations for a world position of compelling power had by the beginning of the 1980s passed through two phases and entered a third. In the early days of the revolution it was confidently hoped that Marxist-Leninist ideology would prove an irresistible magnet to the peoples of the world and the Soviet Union would sit supreme above all nations as its unique source and sole interpreter. In the background, of course, would be the additional solid support of powerful armed forces. Hopes of ideological supremacy were never realized. There has never been a mad rush on the part of other nations to follow the example of Soviet Russia and set up Marxist-Leninist states. These hopes were before long replaced by the equally confident expectation that the Soviet Union would become an economic superpower. It would easily overtake the United States and exercise thereafter unchallenged authority as the world’s richest and most productive nation. There would, of course, still be the support of powerful armed forces. These hopes too were disappointed. The gross national product (GNP) of the Soviet Union by 1984 had not yet reached $3,000 per head of population, which put it in nineteenth place among European nations. By the early 1980s the Soviet Union had indeed become a world power of truly formidable might and influence, not through the attractions of its revolutionary ideology, nor yet through its economic performance. The Soviet Union’s power, which was very great, was almost exclusively military.

Its development, and above all the desperate efforts to achieve military parity with the United States, had been costly. The economic growth of the USSR was at this time slowing down. None the less, its defence expenditure continued to rise at rather more than 5 per cent per annum and was probably taking up more than the whole increase in gross national product. One-third of all mechanical products in their final form were for military stocks, which was a serious handicap in an economy gravely short of equipment and machines. Most of the available research and development effort went to defence, as well as one-fifth of all metal production, together with one-sixth of the chemical output and about the same proportion of all energy consumed. Though the figures were made to look smaller by the Soviet Union’s internal pricing system it seems likely that by 1983 defence expenditure was absorbing something between 15 and 20 per cent of total GNP.

The Soviet Union’s ageing leadership, the character and outlook of which had been formed in the great patriotic war, had always relied heavily upon, and been very close to, the military. On grounds of age alone changes at the top were inevitable before long. Brezhnev had never made the mistake (from which, when it was made by others, his own career had so signally benefited) of indicating an heir apparent in the leadership, but change in the mid-1980s there would certainly be and with the introduction of younger men into the Politburo and the military high command, men who had not been conditioned in the same way as their predecessors, a shift in outlook and priorities could be expected.

Newcomers would hardly be likely to adopt more liberal policies. They would be hard-line realists, to whom the absolute supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and the safeguarding of their own positions in it, would override all other considerations whatsoever. Nevertheless, changes in structure, organization and style would certainly take place, if only to demonstrate that the leadership had changed. For the old guard, therefore, time was running out. They had until about the mid-eighties and probably no longer to extract full benefit in their own way from the Soviet Union’s military strength and its recently developed capability for projecting that strength at a distance, and to consolidate the world position this created. Beyond that time the distortion demanded of the economy for maintaining that position could not be indefinitely sustained, even with a populace long accustomed to its drearier consequences. Moreover, the growth in Soviet military strength had quickened defence expenditure in other countries and this in turn had reacted on the Soviet Union which, even if it had been inclined to recast priorities and spend less on defence, found itself, as the direct result of its own policies, constrained to spend more.

There also loomed the spectre of an extensive and costly military re-equipment programme to replace material, much of which had been developed more than twenty years before to embody a rather different war-fighting philosophy. This would not happen all at once but could not, without encouraging growing weaknesses in the whole defence structure, be long deferred.

There were other tendencies which also pointed to an approaching climacteric. The population of the Soviet Union increased in the years between 1974 and 1984 by some twenty-five million, but only about a quarter of this was Russian. Most of the rest was Asiatic, in which the increase was at about four times the rates found among Muscovites. The greatest increase was in Central Asia. By the early years of the 1980s the population of the USSR included some seventy million Moslems. Impermeability to external influences continued, as always, to be a prime factor in the maintenance of the supreme objective — the total dominance of the CSPU. The complete exclusion of such influences, however, could not be guaranteed, even in the Soviet Union itself.

Hunger for Western-style consumables was found everywhere. Listening to Western broadcasting was common. Probably as many as fifty million people in the Soviet Union in 1981, according to Vladimir Bukovsky, were already receiving the BBC, the Voice of America, Deutsche Welle and other Western radio stations. Very often listeners tuned in for the music and then stayed with the news.

The other Warsaw Pact states were even more open than the USSR to outside influences, especially in view of the inability of COMECON to satisfy their consumer needs and resultant closer contacts with, as well as indebtedness to, Western economies. In the event, therefore, that the USSR should seek a direct military confrontation with the USA it would clearly be unwise to defer this beyond, say, 1985. In the more likely contingency of consideration in the Soviet Union of how far it could proceed with high-risk policies, in which the danger of a military confrontation would be considerable, it would clearly be more prudent to pursue such policies in the early 1980s than later on. The window of opportunity would not remain indefinitely open.

The Soviets in their international relations after the Second World War and before the collapse of Soviet imperialism in the Third, though they were thought by so many to be masters of a shrewd and far-sighted strategy, often demonstrated a quite surprising degree of maladroitness. This was often so striking as to arouse comment at the time. Their extraordinary mismanagement of affairs in Austria in 1946 was a very early example, when their conviction that Austrian gratitude for liberation by the Red Army made it safe to allow free elections, in the confidence that a communist majority would be returned, resulted in the election of an Assembly without a single communist member. There was also their mishandling of affairs in Yugoslavia, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in the Middle East, in the Indian sub-continent and with China, and their dramatic expulsion, lock stock and barrel, in 1972 from what looked like a deeply entrenched position in Egypt. Rarely, however, has the history of international relations shown a more outstanding example of maladroitness than the bringing about of the NATO Alliance and West German rearmament. The Reich lay prostrate before its four principal enemies — the USA, Britain, the Soviet Union and France — totally defeated. Within four years of that time, Soviet policy had so antagonized its former allies that, with their patience exhausted, the other three saw no alternative but to form a defensive alliance and then bring in the defeated enemy re-armed. Pro-Soviet fantasists in the West sought in vain to disguise the simple truth. NATO, a purely defensive structure, was brought into being by the USSR and by the USSR alone. The Soviet Union was itself the only begetter of what was to become its greatest bane.

Citizens of the Soviet Union, as the 1970s moved on into the 1980s, may well by now have come to accept their lot with resignation, without any confidence, or even any hope, that it would ever change for the better. It would be wrong to suppose, as many did in the West, that they were also wholly lacking in awareness of what went on in the other world, outside the closed system which constituted their own. In addition to what came in through radio broadcasts from outside, the circulation of information within the Soviet Union itself was a good deal freer than was commonly realized in the West. It was certainly much freer than the Communist Party liked. A country in which a huge black market flourishes, however, is not one in which information does not circulate, especially when the black market is not only permitted by the authorities but even, as compensation for their own extraordinary ineptitude, actively encouraged, though the circulation of information, of course, is not. Though the concept of public opinion as a political force in a communist state is hardly valid, it was inevitable that in the Soviet Union, in the four or five years before the war, there was not only widespread awareness of what was going on in the outside world but strong currents of political opinion flowing from it. The boycott of the Olympic games made a far greater impression than was commonly realized abroad and the attempts by the Party to play down its effects and claim an outstanding public relations success produced in Moscow a veritable flood of the sick jokes whose volume and venom had long been the only reliable index of public reaction to events. The invasion of Afghanistan aroused wide interest and deep unpopularity and, as it dragged on with no satisfactory end even remotely in sight, it was more clearly recognized as a blunder of the first magnitude. The disposal of the dead in the Afghan campaign threw a particularly interesting light on popular attitudes. At first they were flown home for burial, but as the flow continued and the numbers grew this was seen to be unwise. Public concern in the Asiatic republics, from which most of the first troops engaged in Afghanistan came, was so marked (particularly in Kazakhstan) that from mid-1981 the practice ceased. The dead were now buried in the country where they died.

It will long be argued, with the benefit of hindsight, whether the West should have made greater efforts in the early 1980s to take advantage of the Soviet Union’s difficulties, for example in Afghanistan and Poland. In the former, massive supply of arms to the ‘rebels’, or the active suborning of Soviet troops, would have required a greater degree of collusion by Pakistan than it was wise for that country to give. Moreover, Afghan disunity was almost as powerful a source of weakness as lack of heavy weapons. The Polish case too was a genuine puzzle. Could the West have saved Solidarity? After the imposition of military government, how far was it in the Western interest to do economic damage to the country in the hope that the Government and not the people would suffer, and so be led to allow the progress towards democracy to be resumed?

Ineffective though pre-war efforts in the West had been to exploit Soviet difficulties, they had some interesting by-products. Very little was done in peacetime by Western governments, however tempting the opportunities, to prepare for intervention in the internal affairs of Warsaw Pact countries if war should break out. It was too risky for the CIA or other such agencies to make any large-scale preparations and their governments in general warned them not to try. The period of hostilities when war did break out was too short to organize much more than the support of subversion by the massive injection by air of supplies. What governments had failed to do, however, was in large part made up for by the efforts of those active individuals who had pressed hard for better exploitation of opportunities to harm the Soviet system in peace. Governments in the West found ready to their hand organizations, personnel, training arrangements and even stocks of equipment brought together by activist expatriates of the Baltic States and the Ukraine, and other constituent republics of the Soviet Union, let alone of Warsaw Pact countries. Those in the West whose national origins and interests lay in these countries flooded in, when war threatened, to offer their services. There were many more than could be used during the actual period of hostilities, but good use was made of some, particularly in Poland, the Baltic States and the Ukraine. More useful still were some of those exiles, driven out by communism, who on the collapse of the Soviet Union were more than willing to return to their own countries and contribute to their recovery. Since these often included many of the ablest men and women in their own nations, some with very high capabilities as administrators, their availability in the establishment of successor regimes was invaluable.

The plan which was finally accepted in the Kremlin for the invasion of Western Europe by forces of the Warsaw Pact envisaged a swift occupation of the Federal Republic of Germany, to be completed within ten days, followed by consolidation of a front along the Rhine and the negotiation of a ceasefire with the United States from a position of strength.

There were several very important reasons why the USSR should seek to secure the Rhine stop line with the least possible delay. The first was the need to achieve a decisive military success and a strong and clearly defined political base for negotiation before trans-Atlantic reinforcement could develop a truly dangerous momentum. The second was to give the West as little time as possible to resolve doubts and hesitations over the initial release of nuclear weapons — for it was naturally assumed that the West would need them first, to offset the conventional superiority deployed against them by the Warsaw Pact. A third and scarcely less important reason lay in the necessity to reduce to a minimum the strain of prolonged operations upon the coherence of the Warsaw Pact, particularly where those countries were concerned which, up to the war, had been described as the Pact’s Northern Tier — the German Democratic Republic, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The first two of these reasons are explored in the next chapter. The third merits attention here.

The armed forces of each of these three countries, though all had been set up (ab initio in the GDR, in reconstituted form in Poland and Czechoslovakia) under close Soviet control, differed radically. All armed forces, even when they are raised within an externally imposed straitjacket, reflect the ethos and outlook of parent nations. The part to be played in the Third World War by the armies of the Northern Tier can hardly be said, in retrospect, to have been surprising.

A role was planned for these armies, and initial tasks assigned, in a swift and violent invasion of Western Europe which was to be speedily successful. The plan was only one of many contingency operational plans kept constantly updated in the Kremlin, but it was of the highest importance. It was inevitably the plan which to the three countries concerned was of more importance than any other.

Each of their armies had been organized, equipped, trained and oriented in the basically offensive mode of the Soviet armed forces and integrated into them as closely as differing circumstances allowed. The impatience of certain older and more doctrinaire officers of the Soviet High Command at the apparent unattainability of total integration was understood in the Defence Committee of the Politburo, its most important element, but had to be restrained. The armed forces of these three countries remained, as events proved, very different, each retaining marked characteristics derived from different parentage and upbringing.

The army of the GDR (the National People’s Army or NPA) emerged as a totally new creation in the 1960s. It was always the smallest of the three, at little more than 120,000 strong at the outbreak of war, of which half were eighteen-month conscripts. It had no military tradition of its own (the re-emergence in the 1970s of historic distinctions between Saxon and Prussian units was of no great significance) and was entirely subservient to a Party regime whose interests were closely consonant with those of the Soviet Union. Fear of a threat from West Germany, carefully cultivated by the USSR, was helpful during the formative period, but Ostpolitik and detente reduced the value of this threat as a bonding material, and defection from the NPA to the West in the 1970s was considerable. This was rarely found, it must be said, among officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel, which was evidence of the degree of reward and encouragement offered to the military by the Party. While the two tank and four motor-rifle divisions of the NPA were to be assigned a fully forward role in the offensive of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG) in August 1985, the reliability of the NPA (not so much in the officer cadre, particularly at higher levels, as in the rank and file) was always to the Soviet High Command a cause for uneasiness. When the lightning successes of Warsaw Pact forces over NATO, upon which the loyalty of the East German NPA within the Pact depended, even more than it did with others, failed to materialize and there was civil commotion, starting with sabotage and violence first of all in Dresden on 11 August, it was not thought prudent to use the NPA, at least in the first instance, to suppress it. The Bereitschaftspolizei of the Ministry of the Interior were called in first and then, when the rioting spread on 14 August to Leipzig, a Wach-regiment under the orders of the Ministry of State Security moved in. When disorder spread further, Soviet permission was, with the utmost reluctance, sought by the GDR to withdraw NPA regular troops to suppress it, and permission was as reluctantly given. The three NPA motor rifle regiments brought back for the purpose on 17/18 August proved unmanageable. Orders were disobeyed, desertion was rife, officers were shot. The Party was still supreme in the GDR but from now on it was progressively less able to govern.

How different was the case of Poland. The Polish armed forces, having refused in 1970 to intervene against the near-rebellious civil population, felt obliged to take complete control of the country in 1981. It is still not clear whether General Jaruzelski imposed martial law because in his view as a Polish patriot it was the only alternative to an outright imposition of Soviet administration, or because, as a communist, he genuinely believed that Solidarity’s power was incompatible with the orderly government of the state. Whatever the answer to this riddle, the assumption of power had two effects on the Polish Army. Its manpower was deeply committed to the maintenance of internal security, and so could make less contribution to an external military operation. On the other hand, fighting West Germans might be more attractive to many Polish soldiers than repressing Solidarity. In fact they were soon to have the worst of both worlds, when it became clear that one of the Polish Army’s main roles in the war would be to prevent Polish partisans from cutting the Soviet supply lines across Polish territory into Federal Germany.

The threat to Polish national independence posed by the FRG, heavily emphasized by the Soviets, had become increasingly less credible during the 1970s. There was little else to bind Polish military interests to the USSR in its obsession with a blind hostility to NATO. The unwillingness of the Soviet military to treat their Polish colleagues as professionals of the same standing (which, at equivalent levels, they undoubtedly were) and the reluctance of Moscow to furnish the Polish Army with modern equipment did little to bridge the inevitable gap between nations that had been more often enemies than friends. On the Soviet side, moreover, the tendency of the Polish military to allow professionalism to take precedence over ideology was in the late seventies arousing increasing uneasiness.

Poland could never, therefore, have been regarded by the Soviets at that time as a wholly reliable military ally. One condition alone did more than anything else to keep Poland lined up with the Warsaw Pact plans for a swift invasion of Western Germany. This was the certainty that if Poland came out of the arrangement, a Warsaw Pact-NATO battle would be fought not on German territory but on Polish, a swift, decisive invasion of western Germany was infinitely preferable. In the event the invasion though swift was not decisive and Soviet fears about the military reliability of Polish troops were soon realized. When the Soviet lines of communication through Poland became increasingly disrupted from partisan activity, plentifully and ably supplied (though with very considerable losses) by NATO air forces, the move of Polish formations back from Germany to look after the security of communications inside Poland was a total failure The mutiny in Poznan on 17 August in one of Poland s eight mechanized division, the first formation to be sent home, for internal security duties, was the signal for a general showdown with the Soviet high Command.

In Czechoslovakia, the events of August 1968 not only put an end to all hopes of steady progress towards the eventual total identification of Czechoslovak and Soviet interests. They also virtually destroyed the Czechoslovak People’s Army (CPA).

Early hopes of a fusion between Czech and Soviet interests were never, in fact, wholly justified. It is true that the USSR could regard Czechoslovakia, in the early years of the inter-war period, as the most pro-Soviet of all its new client states. The Czechoslovak elections of 1947 were not conducted, as many have alleged, under duress from the Red Army, which was at that time quite thin on the ground in Czechoslovakia. The setting up of a communist government was in the first instance the result of a more or less respectable democratic process, if somewhat tarnished by the coup in 1948, and was, ironically enough, almost as decisive as the massive rejection of communism by the Austrians in the free elections which the Soviets had so unwisely permitted the year before. In the following years the steady re-emergence of Czech national sentiments, of anti-Soviet opinion and of restlessness with external repression of free institutions, resulted, in Dubcek’s time, in a level of dissatisfaction with Soviet hegemony too dangerous in itself and too likely to spread infection outside Czech frontiers to be disregarded.

Within the CPA there had been for at least a decade before 1968 a growing disenchantment with Soviet insistence on the total subordination of Czech interests to those of the Soviet Union, which was particularly galling to an officer corps deeply concerned for national security. Almost equally galling to military professionals was the growing intrusion of political considerations into military affairs. This was especially resented among highly qualified younger officers who often found their careers suffering from their own strong disinclination to accept Soviet doctrine, structures and interests as of unique and paramount importance in the sphere of Czechoslovak defence.

The invasion of August 1968, ordered and led by the Soviet Union but with a token inclusion of forces from other client states, tore the CPA apart. It also put an end to hitherto quite marked pro-Soviet tendencies in the country as a whole. The army never recovered, in size and professionalism, its previous standing. Up to the outbreak of war in 1985, in spite (and partly because) of persistent Soviet efforts to re-impose total Soviet control over the Czechoslovak military apparatus, the CPA could never be counted on as a wholly reliable Soviet instrument. It remained firmly tasked, none the less, to offensive action in a quick war against the West. Even before the advance slowed down, however, as a result of NATO defensive action in the Federal Republic of Germany, the mutiny which broke out in the CPA 4 Motor Rifle Division at Cheb on 17 and 18 August was predictable.

All in all the Soviet planners could not count very much on the military contribution of their Warsaw Pact allies. The purpose of the Pact was not, as in NATO, that a group of nations should pool their war efforts in a common cause. It was much simpler and more brutal.

What the Soviets wanted from the Pact was a security apparatus under their control to prevent the territory of the other members being used as a springboard or corridor for an attack on the Soviet Union. They needed a glacis, not an alliance. Both the definitions of ‘glacis’ given in the Oxford English Dictionary are apposite: ‘A place made slippery by wet lately fallen and frozen on’, or ‘The parapet of the covered way extended in a long slope to meet the natural surface of the ground, so that every part of it shall be swept by the fire of the ramparts’. It is not a place on which to expose friendly forces.

Chapter 8: Plans for War: Politburo Debates

Major General Igor Borodin, a member of the Central Committee and of the Secretariat of the so-called Administrative Department, in effect the controlling element of the Red Army and the KGB, escaped the carnage of the last days of August 1985 in Moscow and found his way to the headquarters of VII US Corps. His debriefing at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe produced the following document (SH-003-47B-5320) dated 17 September 1985, declassified 5 June 1986.

Except in a time of crisis the Politburo would only meet once a week, on Thursdays at 3 pm, when members and candidate members assembled in the old Senate building of the Kremlin.

The Politburo was the embodiment of the Party’s absolute power over all aspects of life and society. This was somewhat disguised by cosmetic devices such as the post of President, who had no power whatsoever, and the Parliament, or Supreme Soviet, which ratified every Politburo decision unanimously and whose members were appointed from amongst the most devoted Party officials and could be replaced without any difficulty. There was no doubt at all where real power lay.

The agenda for a normal Politburo session were drafted several months in advance by the Secretariat of the Party Central Committee and then approved by the Politburo members. The Secretariat of the Central Committee prepared and distributed all necessary material in good time, besides summoning people required to furnish information, such as ministers, marshals and generals, diplomats and intelligence officers, the editors of leading newspapers, writers, scientists and judges, the leaders of Gosplan (the state planning organization), of the penal system, of the ideological propaganda front, of agriculture and so on.

For some of these the summons by the Central Committee Secretariat was a catastrophe. For others it marked the beginning of an upward turn in their careers. In crucial cases some, after the summons to the Secretariat, would then have to give evidence before the Politburo itself.

The Politburo was interested in everything and had its own resolute opinion on all matters. It could decide that a given opera conformed to the interests of socialism, but that a particular ballet did not and must not be performed.

On 6 December 1984, the Politburo discussed the situation in Europe. It was accustomed to use several sources of information. Two reports had been prepared for this meeting, one by the political intelligence service (the First Main Directorate of the KGB), the other by the military intelligence service (the Second Main Directorate of the Soviet Army General Staff — the GRU). The two reports relied on different methods of analysis. They both reached the same conclusion: Western Europe was dying of decay.

The KGB was able to take some credit in suggesting that the unbridled power of the trade unions was at the heart of the West’s economic and political decline. With memories of Solidarity in Poland still fresh in Soviet minds, this struck a sympathetic note. The communist political parties in the West had largely turned out to be unsatisfactory instruments of Soviet infiltration, either because they were notably unsuccessful in the political arena, as in the United Kingdom, or politically unreliable, as in Italy. But they had achieved real success in industrial organization, in penetrating or influencing the trade union structure both locally and nationally. The bourgeois governments of Western Europe had not been able or willing to apply the Polish remedy of martial law in order to control the self-destructive strikes and go-slows which contributed so satisfactorily to the decay of Western capitalism. Their efforts to improve matters by ‘social contracts’ and similar devices had been laughably ineffective, and Western society was, in accordance with Marxist doctrine, riven by economic contradictions. Governments were prepared to tolerate massive unemployment as an alternative to inflation. The workers were prepared to destroy large parts of industry in order to maintain their historic working practices. The time was ripe for the Soviet Union to act, before the accumulated frustrations of the bourgeoisie led Western governments at last to take adequate measures to control industrial anarchy.

The GRU believed that the reason for Europe’s decay lay in the unprecedented spread of neutralist and pacifist attitudes. Europe did not want to defend itself. It seemed to believe that its best defence lay in helplessness. The more determination the Soviet Union showed in the international arena, the weaker Europe would become. Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan had not been followed by a strengthening but by a noticeable weakening in NATO and Western Europe. The same was true of the troubles in Poland. These neutralist and pacifist attitudes might not persist.

During discussion the most important question was whether the fruit was ripe enough. Was this the right moment to shake the tree?

Opinions differed. The GRU advised that the moment had come. Thanks to a policy of detente the Soviet Union had been able to deploy a whole new generation of nuclear weapons for the European theatre, as well as improved conventional armaments, which the West, for political and financial reasons, had been unable to match. Europe might in the future change its mind and give more support to the tougher attitude recently apparent in the United States.

The KGB believed that an even more favourable situation would develop in a couple of years’ time. The suggestion that the Western Alliance would become more coherent in the future could, of course, be dismissed. Europe would become still further detached from the USA and within itself more divided. Further sharp increases in the price of oil, economic recession, widespread strikes and increasingly violent demonstrations would lead to deep uncertainty and general discontent. This would culminate in the collapse of several Western European governments, soonest of all in those countries which, having nationalized heavy industries, had proved wholly unable to run them effectively.

Both intelligence services agreed that the best opportunity for military action would follow mass riots in Western European cities, organized by trades unionists, advocates of peace, students, the unemployed, racists and conservationists. National communist parties, largely working through the trade unions, would be particularly helpful here. Western European governments would be so destabilized and paralysed by these riots that it would not be hard for the Soviet Union to find an occasion to intervene.

The question was asked whether the Soviet intelligence services were confident that disturbances could be organized on a large enough scale. The representatives of both services gave a positive reply.

The Defence Council then examined the Operational Plan. The Defence Council was the most powerful part of the Politburo, made up of only those members directly involved in the most important military matters. These were the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, the Supreme Party Ideologist, the head of the Organizational Department of the Central Committee (that is, the head of the Party machine), the Minister of Defence, and the Chairman of the KGB.

The Operational Plan was the war plan drawn up among the 100 generals and 620 colonels who made up the First Main Directorate of the General Staff. It was based on an analysis of known intentions and probabilities, and of Soviet forces and those of likely enemies, the latter supplied by the GRU.

The Operational Plan was worked out at the end of each year for the following year and then approved by the Defence Council. In practice, the Operational Plan for the current year was usually last year’s plan, adjusted in respect of changes in the international situation and the correlation of forces.

On the basis of the General Staff Operational Plan, the General Staffs of the Strategic Rocket Force (SRF) and of the national Air Defence Forces (PVO Strany), and also the Staffs of Strategic Theatres, made their own operational plans. In their turn the headquarters of military districts, naval fleets and army groups worked out plans for their own areas of responsibility. The headquarters of Operational Directorates based their planning both on information from the General Staff intelligence service and on reports from their own intelligence directorates. These formed part of each main headquarters, disposing of their own networks of agents, guerrilla sub-units, and electronic, airborne and other means of surveillance.

The Eastern European states did not make their own operational plans. Instead, the Warsaw Pact headquarters informed the Eastern European commands only of what was of particular concern to them in their allotted tasks.

The Operational Plan for the year 1985 embraced every possible theatre.

The fifty Soviet divisions in the Far Eastern and Trans-Baykal districts (of which only eight were in Category One — that is, at operational strength) were sufficient to watch this frontier for the time being. China would without doubt develop into a major threat at some time in the future. A world crisis might give it earlier opportunities. For the moment that theatre was stable.

In South-West Asia there were always possibilities of conflict with the United States, with or without some of its satellites.

In the Middle East the USSR had already in this very year come quite close to a war with the USA. This had arisen largely from local mischief-making, with Syria and Israel, from opposite sides, as chief mischief-makers. Strenuous efforts had made it possible to avoid open conflict and the neutralization of Israel under guarantee, with the creation of an autonomous Palestinian state, had established some sort of stability in the area. This, without prejudice to longer-term political aims, afforded some tactical advantage in the shorter term. It was desirable to keep Israel neutral.

Policies designed to destabilize the Caribbean and Central America, and distract the attention of the United States and particularly that of the American public, from Europe, had had only moderate success. These should be pursued further.

The Operational Plan set out detailed contingency planning for military operations in any likely circumstances — in the Far East and the Pacific, in South-West Asia, in Africa and in Central and South America. Top priority was given to possible operations in Europe.

Document OP-85E-SSOV (Operational Plan for the year 1985, Europe, Top Secret and of Special Importance) consisted of that part of the Operational Plan which related to possible operations against NATO in Europe. No copy of this has come to light. Major General Borodin, however, gave what he maintained was a clear recollection of its contents.

‘The first part of the document was an analysis of the probable enemy’s forces. The second part concerned the strength of Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces in Europe. The third part dealt with the plan for the utilization of these forces.

‘Of the plan put forward in the third part, there were three versions.

Variant A was divided into five phases, set out as follows:

‘Phase One (duration 24 minutes): a sudden mass nuclear attack throughout the entire European theatre, including Spain and Portugal, in total depth. The following forces would take part in this first strike: 1 Missile Army of the Strategic Rocket Force; the missile brigades of the thirteen Front Tank Armies and Tank Army Groups (in all twenty-six missile brigades); the missile brigades of the Combined Armies and Tank Armies (in all twenty-eight missile brigades); the missile battalions of all motor rifle and tank divisions within range; the missile submarines of the North, Baltic and Black Sea Fleets and those of 5 Nautical Squadron. Their salvoes would be fired simultaneously by all missile units from their permanent deployment points or their positions at the time. Of the divisional missile battalions (equipped with missiles of up to 150 kilometres’ range), only those would take part in the attack that were located in the immediate vicinity of the frontiers. The first strike was intended to neutralize all enemy forces down to divisions, brigades and regiments, with particular attention to headquarters, together with missile bases, airfields, the principal communications and administrative centres and the air defence systems.

‘Phase Two (duration 96 minutes) follows immediately after Phase One. Eight Air Armies, the aircraft of three fleets, two corps of long-distance strategic aircraft, sub-units of the civil aviation Aeroflot and all military transport aircraft will take part. During this phase a maximum effort will be made to determine the results of the first nuclear attack. At the same time, a heavy air attack will be made on any targets seen to have survived the first attack. These would largely be mobile targets, such as field command posts and mobile missile units.

‘Nuclear and chemical weapons will be used. At the same time, the military transport aircraft and Aeroflot transport will drop guerrilla sub-units of Spetsnaz (Special Assignment Force) in areas not under nuclear or chemical attack. As soon as the Phase Two attack begins, all the missile launchers which took part in the first attack will when possible be reloaded and tactical missiles not used in the first strike because of their limited range, but which can now be brought to bear, will be moved swiftly forward into the main attack. Missile sub-units will receive target information directly from reconnaissance aircraft.

‘Phase Three (duration 30 minutes): all missile sub-units again deliver a massive nuclear attack, as soon as the aircraft are clear. This attack is intended to destroy newly revealed targets and targets insufficiently damaged in the first attacks. Chemical warheads will predominate, although the density of nuclear warheads will remain high.

‘Phase Four (duration 7 days): the success of this phase of the operation depends on surprise. Most Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces are not put in a state of readiness at the preliminary alert. The stand-to signal for these divisions is given only as the first nuclear attack takes place. The two and a half hours required for the first three phases of the operation is sufficient time to prepare their echelons and to move them forward from their stations. Detailed plans of action for each division, each army and each front, are worked out in advance and kept sealed. All that remains for commanding officers to do is to unseal the appropriate package and carry out the orders prescribed in it. All others will be destroyed. Even if the assault echelon divisions have not had time fully to prepare themselves in two and a half hours, they must nevertheless be moved forward into action. In these circumstances the enemy divisions will be at a disadvantage. The assault by the first echelon divisions will take place simultaneously along the entire front, to drive in wedges as quickly and as deeply as possible wherever enemy defences permit. On the second or third day of this action the Front Tank Armies will be put in where success has been greatest. On the fourth day of the operation, in any zone where enemy resistance has been effectively suppressed, the Belorussian Group of Tank Armies will be put in to strike across Europe towards the Atlantic coast. During the fourth phase, aircraft and missile sub-units will take supporting action as required by ground and naval forces. On each of the first three days there will be a parachute drop of one airborne division. If the availability of military transport and Aeroflot aircraft permitted, all divisions would have been dropped simultaneously on the first day of the operation. But this is not possible.

‘Phase Five would be carried out only in the event of Soviet and East European forces being brought to a halt in West Germany and becoming involved in sustained operations. This could lead to the development of a static front with a linear deployment of NATO forces from north to south. In this case the Ukrainian Group of Tank Armies will move at maximum speed from Hungary through Austria (neutrality notwithstanding) on the axis Linz-Frankfurt-Dunkirk. The purpose of this phase is to disrupt the Allied lines of communication and cut their line of retreat and then press on to the sea.

Variant B was almost identical with Variant A, although nuclear weapons are not employed. Instead, all missile formations and units deliver a concentrated chemical and high-explosive attack whilst at the same time maintaining a state of constant readiness for the use of nuclear weapons. Variant B envisages a period of tension in Europe before military operations begin, lasting for anything from several days to several months or even one year. The troops on both sides will be in a state of readiness for all this time, carrying out exercises close to the enemy’s lines. The longer this period of tension lasts the better it will be for the Soviet Union. Weariness, boredom and false alarms will combine to reduce alertness. Soviet and Warsaw Pact formations can then be swiftly put on the alert and moved into the attack forthwith. To this the response of NATO forces is likely to be sluggish. Variant B also provides for a possible lightning attack from peacetime locations without chemical weapons. This can best be done when the West is most vulnerable: for example, in August during the holiday period.

Variant C was divided into a preliminary and a main stage.

‘Preliminary Stage (duration 10 days): during this period several dozen civilian special service groups formed in Western and Asiatic non-communist countries will head for Western Europe. Each group acts independently and will not know that its mission is part of a general plan. At the same time, Spetsnaz sabotage units numbering some 5,000 men will cross into Western Europe as tourists. Simultaneously, Soviet merchant ships, with sub-units of marines and sabotage troops hidden on board, will sail towards Europe’s main ports.

Main Stage: at an appointed time the Spetsnaz groups will destroy key electric power stations with explosives. If sixty of these can be put out of action, the whole of industry and all communication systems in Western Europe will be paralysed and rail transport will come to a standstill. All other means of transport including aircraft will be severely handicapped by lack of communications. In these circumstances it can be expected that water supplies will be cut off, radio and television broadcasting will cease, refrigeration will be impossible and produce will perish in warehouses. In buildings, lifts will stop, lights will go out, and telephones and alarm systems will be cut off. In large cities traffic chaos will result. Petrol and oil fuel supplies will give out. The underground railways will come to a halt. The work of government establishments, military headquarters and police forces will be disrupted. Crime will increase enormously and panic will set in. Pro-Soviet saboteurs in civilian clothes should now be able with little difficulty to destroy the principal communications systems of the main NATO headquarters and put out of action the command posts of the air defence systems. At the same time, Soviet military transport and Aeroflot aircraft will carry out a mass drop of paratroop divisions. These landings will be safeguarded by Soviet REP Osnaz (Special Electronic Counter-Measures Force) sub-units which will ‘blind’ NATO’s radar stations. The mission of the airborne divisions is to seize government establishments, military headquarters and command posts, and to disrupt all state and military administration systems. Once this has been accomplished and before it has been possible in the West to evaluate what has happened, the Soviet Government will urgently appeal to the US Government to refrain from a nuclear response and will give guarantees that the Soviet Union will not use nuclear weapons.’

Several points of outstanding importance were raised when Document OP-85E-SSOV was discussed in the Kremlin. The first was whether the attack should be nuclear from the outset, as in Variant A. Arguments for this were strong. The USSR had a lead over the USA in land-based missile weapons of inter-continental range, though not in those delivered by aircraft or from submarines.

The bomber aircraft mattered less than the submarines. It was noted that Britain and France had obstinately maintained, and even modernized, independent submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) capabilities which, though modest, could do critical damage in the Soviet Union. The USSR was well ahead of the West in military and civil defence provision and in the hardening of launching sites, communications and administrative accommodation. Its size and the dispersal of its population conferred significant advantage. In theatre nuclear forces (TNF) the START Treaty had reduced the Soviet Union’s lead but this was still considerable. It had not been possible, unfortunately, to prevent the beginning of the installation of the new TNF, the Pershing II and cruise missile weapons, though the refusal of the Netherlands to host any had been helpful. The great strides made in generating anti-American and anti-nuclear tendencies in the Alliance reflected considerable credit on those responsible. The billion dollars’ worth of hard currency this had cost the Soviet Union was money well spent. It was difficult to believe but nevertheless true that the conviction was widely held in Britain that if there were no nuclear weapons in the British Isles they would be immune from nuclear attack. This conviction was particularly creditable to Soviet disinformation services and those responsible were to be congratulated. Since the British Isles were of paramount importance to the NATO war effort in Europe they would, of course, without any question be attacked and neutralized, whatever the circumstances.

Although in TNF in general the USSR was superior, it could not be absolutely guaranteed that the United States would refrain from the use against the Soviet Union of nuclear weapons of inter-continental range, if a nuclear attack were mounted on Western Europe, though the probability that the USA would use strategic nuclear weapons if its European allies were facing early defeat by non-nuclear means was low. Nor could it be guaranteed that a first strike on the United States would destroy so much of its ICBM capability as to rule out the possibility of a highly destructive response. It almost went without saying that what was known in the muddled jargon of the West as ‘escalation’ would certainly take place. That meant that a decision to use any nuclear weapon was in effect a decision to go the whole way into the full strategic exchange.

Would this, for the USSR, be worthwhile? Even if the USA were devastated, would the Soviet Union in the aftermath be in a position to retain full control over its own people, let alone those of restless client states? This was doubtful. Heavy damage and high casualties in Warsaw Pact states would loosen ties in the socialist world rather than strengthen them, while the progress of the USSR itself would be set back so far as to open dangerous opportunities to China. Opinion in the Politburo appeared to be hardening against the option of a nuclear opening.

None the less there was a deep and manifest difference of opinion here which could not be overcome. One group, resolutely led by the Chairman of the KGB, Army General Sergei Athanasievich Aristanov, ably supported by the Minister of Defence, Marshal Alexei Alexandrovich Nastin (each a member of the Defence Council of the Politburo), maintained that the Soviet approach to war demanded the swift and violent use of the most powerful weapons available. This suggested, logically enough, a nuclear opening, in total depth, including, it went without saying, ICBM attack on the continental United States. In the strategic exchange between the central systems of the two great powers the Soviet Union would suffer grave damage which would put its progress back significantly. But it would survive and in time recover. The United States, on the other hand, would be destroyed, leaving the Soviet Union to establish progressive socialist societies in its own good time throughout the present capitalist West.

The arguments for a conventional opening were well known. There would clearly be advantage in a non-nuclear victory and this, with good timing and the correct handling of field operations, was not impossible. If, however, the advance into Western Europe were so far delayed that the Rhine could not be secured within ten days there must be no question but that the whole of the Soviet Union’s nuclear capability must be applied and quickly used. There must be no withholding of the more powerful weapons in the hope that the enemy would do the same with his, and no concession at all to the fallacious Western concept of escalation, which is not only fundamentally incorrect but wholly out of keeping with the now well-established, and even traditional, Soviet method of making war. If there were any uncertainty over the achievement of very early success by non-nuclear means, however, the whole operation should without any doubt be nuclear from the start.

The Supreme Party Ideologist, Constantin Andrievich Malinsky, who was a member of the Politburo Defence Council, supported by the leader of the Organization of the Party and State Control, Otto Yanovich Berzinsh, and Taras Kyrillovich Nalivaiko, responsible for relations with socialist countries (both being members of the Politburo but not of the Defence Council) demurred. It must be the aim of the Soviet Union to realize Lenin’s grand design of a world under communist rule. A world of which much would be charred rubble or irradiated desert would hardly be worth ruling. What was wanted was supremacy in a living world, not over a charnel house it would be death to enter. Nuclear weapons were to frighten rather than to fight with. Their use would set up a contradiction in socialist practice which should be avoided except in the very last resort and only after the deepest thought.

For the time being, at least, the majority were in favour of a non-nuclear opening and the meeting passed to consider other matters.

The position of European neutrals was discussed. Sweden, in spite of signs of restlessness in recent years, could almost certainly be cowed into maintaining its traditional stance. France was an unknown quantity. It was a member of the Atlantic Alliance but not of its military organization, NATO. France’s record of self-interest suggested that it might, and probably would, abstain from belligerence if the advantage offered were sufficient. Ireland would probably follow France’s lead, though recently improved Anglo-Irish relations raised doubts here and it would be as well to target key installations in Ireland for conventional destruction in order to deny their use to the Western allies. The chance would have to be taken that Irish facilities would become available to the enemy, which could raise problems for the Soviet Navy in the Eastern Atlantic.

To occupy France would impose a serious burden on Soviet resources and involve a significant addition to occupied territories which would certainly raise security problems of their own.

What would help France to stay out would be a guarantee of total immunity. This suggested that, though offensive action should be planned to cover the whole of Western Europe, the immediate aim should be to occupy and dismantle Federal Germany, stopping, for the time being at least, at the Rhine, while the Federal Republic was being dealt with and negotiations were in progress with the USA. The intention to stop at the Rhine would be widely publicized with maximum pressure on France to accept the Soviet guarantee of immunity and abstain from belligerence, which it almost certainly would. The destruction of Federal Germany would then inevitably cause the collapse of the Atlantic Alliance.

This policy received approval.

The question of distracting the attention of the United States from Europe was again discussed. If the USA could be involved in active warfare in Central America and the Caribbean, American public opinion would be unlikely to favour massive support for NATO in Europe. The Warsaw Pact should then have an easy victory. Energetic action to this end should still be pursued, with particular attention to Cuba.

A suggestion to mount an amphibious and airborne threat to the western seaboard of North America, as a further distraction from war in Europe, was dismissed as implausible. The support of even a small amphibious force across the Bering Sea was impracticable in the face of United States maritime and land-based air strength, while the inability of the Soviet Air Force (SAF) to lift and then maintain all of its seven airborne divisions at once was well known.

The question was then raised of action in Asia to distract the attention of the United States from the focal point in Europe. Would the setting up of crises either in East Asia, as for example in the area of Indochina, or in South-West Asia, perhaps in the oil-producing areas, be useful? The conclusion was that they would not be productive either in the right way or at the right time, with the possible exception of the Korean peninsula. It would be a mistake to alarm China before Federal Germany was destroyed. Operations in South-West Asia would draw off Soviet and US forces in about equal strengths, which would show a net advantage to the Soviet Union in global terms. There were, however, too many unpredictable factors in that region. What would Pakistan do? What of the Arab world? What of the Moslem population of the Soviet Union? It was thought best to take one thing at a time. The speedy liquidation of the Federal Republic of Germany was the primary objective and nothing must distract attention from this. Where disinformation and action in support of progressive policies was showing promise among native populations, as in southern Africa, these activities should continue. Major initiatives outside Europe, however, should not now be undertaken until the primary objective had been realized and the Alliance destroyed.

Offensive action in space was also discussed. Obviously the highly developed Soviet capability for interference with US space operations would be fully exploited. Would nuclear weapons be used? The 1963 agreement not to employ weapons in space could, of course, be disregarded. The chief question that arose was whether nuclear weapons could be used in space or at sea without initiating the central exchange. It was thought that they should not be used at all unless it was accepted that the inter-continental exchange would inevitably follow. The question of electro-magnetic pulse (EMP), however, was of particular interest. To the less technically inclined members of the Politburo it was explained that a fusion weapon exploded outside the atmosphere, say 200 kilometres up, would cause no thermal, blast or radiation damage on the earth but would generate a pulse of immense power which could damage or destroy electric or electronic equipment over a wide area, disrupt electricity distribution and communications and severely disorient instrumentation, with what could be catastrophic operational results. The West was far more vulnerable to EMP than the USSR. Should the electromagnetic pulse be exploited?

There was considerable support for this discriminate use of a nuclear weapon but in the end it was agreed that it would probably be taken as a clear indication of intention to wage all-out thermonuclear war, with all that that implied. It should not, therefore, be done unless all-out nuclear war were intended.

In discussion of the operational alternatives, Politburo members drew attention to shortcomings in the planning. They instructed that a revised Plan be submitted in two weeks for final approval.

On 20 December 1984 that part of the revised Plan of the First Main Directorate of the General Staff which concerned operations against NATO was once again submitted to the Defence Council. A map-room exercise was held, with the head of the First Main Directorate of the General Staff acting as leader of the ‘Eastern’ forces and the head of the GRU leading the ‘Western’ troops. The task of the head of the GRU was to stop the ‘Eastern’ forces. He would consider every possible manoeuvre and weapon available to the enemy in battle. The head of the First Main Directorate had also to take appropriate measures to overcome ‘Western’ opposition. It stood to reason, of course, that if in the real battle the enemy were to use unexpected techniques, equipment or tactics which would halt the Soviet breakthrough, of which the Soviet military intelligence service had given no warning, the GRU chief would be court-martialled.

The Chief of the General Staff supervised this duel between his two subordinates and acted as umpire. The Politburo members observed the battle closely. For the moment, at least, it was only being fought on maps. The conclusion was that a favourable outcome was likely.

When the map exercise was over, the Chief of the General Staff, the heads of the Main Directorates and their deputies were all subjected to rigorous questioning by Politburo members, not on the particular operational matters under discussion but generally on the state of Soviet and NATO forces. It is a curious and interesting fact that in committees the world over, however powerful and important, there is a tendency to explore matters, often in some detail, which are not of the highest importance in themselves but which attract the interest of some of the members — the lay members particularly. This is sometimes exploited by other members as a device to avoid discussion of points which might prove embarrassing. The Politburo was no exception.

Once again there arose the old question of what happens to NATO’s obsolescent armaments. The members of the Politburo refused to believe that all the tanks, artillery and armoured personnel carriers which NATO had taken out of service would actually have been disposed of. Knowing in advance that this question was bound to crop up yet again, the chief of military intelligence had brought with him secret reports about the destruction of obsolete weapons in the West, with a film showing the destruction of such weapons. This did not succeed in dispelling doubts. Again and again it was asked if all these documents might not simply be the product of Western disinformation services which, though less widespread and effective than those of the Soviet Union, were known to be far from idle. The GRU chief explained that it was completely true, that he had detailed accounts of the destruction of old equipment. There then arose the question of why NATO did this. The Soviet intelligence service found that hard to answer.

The West’s policy in relation to obsolete armaments thus remained a mystery. The Soviet Union did not destroy its old military equipment. It preserved it. A thoroughly obsolete tank can be buried in the ground up to its very turret. The turret may then be additionally fortified with armour plates. The tank does not have to move at all. Its engine and caterpillar tracks are already of no use, but its armour is as strong as it used to be. Its main armament and machine-guns may be fired as before. Its optical instruments and signals equipment remain. According to the Soviet view, two or three old tank crew members with one obsolete tank buried in the ground might, suitably sited, effectively defend a wide frontage, perhaps replacing a whole company or even a first-rate infantry battalion. The buried tank is invaluable in both nuclear and chemical warfare and its crew live in warmth and comfort. If the turret is reinforced with additional armour and well camouflaged, one obsolete tank can stop several of the enemy’s advancing tanks. The Politburo simply could not understand why NATO had withdrawn from service literally tens of thousands of tanks, including those real armoured fortresses the Conqueror and the M-103, with their powerful guns, when in actual fact any sort of tank buried in the ground was a far better alternative to two or three infantrymen with rifles in a dirty, disintegrating trench. If NATO had secretly kept all its old tanks, then during the period of a threat of war, or even once war had begun, an impregnable steel defence could have been created.

Some of the members of the Politburo, of course, had had experience of tank warfare in the Great Patriotic War, some forty years before. None had served in airborne forces and few had any idea of the capability of helicopter assault in vertical envelopment.

On the following day, 21 December, an extraordinary meeting of the Politburo took place, for discussion of the situation in Eastern Europe and the possible behaviour of the USSR’s allies in the event of war. The report was given by the Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Armed Forces of the Warsaw Pact, Marshal of the Soviet Union V. G. Kulikov. In the Soviet hierarchy this post, it must be said, commanded little respect. For a Soviet marshal, appointment to it meant honourable retirement from the real centre of power. A principal reason for its invention was to hide the simple fact that all decisions for the Warsaw Pact were actually made within the Soviet General Staff. The Supreme Commander was the titular military head of the Warsaw Pact armies. He was officially no more than one of the deputies to the Soviet Minister of Defence. The Soviet Minister of Defence gave orders to the Commander-in-Chief of the Warsaw Pact as his deputy. The latter then delivered the orders to the ‘allies’ and saw to it that they were carried out as correctly as possible. He reported back on the execution of the orders to the Soviet Minister of Defence, who in turn reported back to his colleagues in the Politburo.

Kulikov’s report to the Politburo referred to above brought little satisfaction to its members. From a military point of view Eastern Europe was well armed, but there was some lack of confidence in the willingness of Eastern European countries to fight. For example, Poland had been able, at the expense of reducing the living standards of its people and thanks to astronomical Western credits, to create armed forces with four times as many tanks as the British Army. Poland had a marine infantry division. Only two or three countries, notably the USA, allowed themselves such a luxury; the Soviet Union was not prepared to maintain such a division. However, the situation in Poland was radically changing. Polish workers had thrust a wedge into the Party structure. The movement had been incompletely suppressed. Polish anti-socialist forces might be able, in the worst case, to hamper their country’s war effort very seriously. This would not only reduce the value to the Soviet Union of its most powerful military ally, but would also do much to disrupt the maintenance of Soviet forces operating in West Germany.

For the moment, East Germany continued to remain faithful, but how would its troops react to closer contact with Western influences and better opportunities to defect? The defection rate in the GDR was already quite high.

Czechoslovakia had remained in a state of ambivalence, almost of torpor, since 1968. At that time its army did not want to fight against the Red Army. Would the Czechoslovak People’s Army now fight against anyone else?

In Hungary the situation was quite the opposite. The events of 1956 had been followed by economic developments which had unfortunately led to some erosion of socialism and a lessening of Party authority. What would the Hungarian Army do if war broke out? How far would it be disposed to fight for socialism?

Bulgaria had been deeply corrupted by Western influence. Every year there was in Bulgaria one Western tourist for every three inhabitants. The country was thriving on tourism and on little else. If Western Europe went socialist, there would be no more Western tourists and the hard currency they brought would cease to come in. Where would the advantage lie for Bulgarians in a change in the existing situation?

That left Romania. In some ways it appeared to be unfriendly but the Soviet Union could not afford to lose Ceausescu. He certainly had no desire to see the USSR collapse and he might well be a constant ally. It was a pity that Romania’s army was so very weak and its economic situation scarcely less than catastrophic.

When the report was finished the Supreme Party Ideologist stood up and gave the Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Forces of the Warsaw Pact the following order:

‘At the forthcoming meeting of the Warsaw Pact Political Advisory Council three fundamental points must be very diplomatically, but clearly and candidly, put forward:

a. It is not only wrong to betray friends, especially at war, it can also be suicidal.

b. The Soviet Union will always have a powerful nuclear capability in reserve for the punishment of traitors.

c. Western Europe will undoubtedly be destroyed, leaving those who have deserted socialism with no refuge. It is much safer to remain on the winning side.’

Chapter 9: Nekrassov’s View

Andrei Nekrassov, Party member though he was (as he had to be), did not wholly trust Soviet propaganda. He could not disclose this publicly, of course. As pressures built up inside him, however, he felt an urgent need to share the load he was bearing with someone else. It was a great boon to him that the one person outside his family whom he wholly trusted, someone with a great, if different, awareness of the sort of things over which he was himself puzzled, was at hand. Nekrassov was able, in private and personal conversations held always well away from the possibility of eavesdropping, at least to say some of what was on his mind to Dimitri Vassilievitch Makarov. The bond between these two was stronger now than ever. Makarov’s widowed father, the lecturer in history in the Lomonossov University, whom Dimitri, his only child, had not seen for over a year, had had a sudden heart attack and died. The two young men, reserved in their attitude to other people, began to see themselves more and more almost as brothers.

Andrei Nekrassov naturally did what was expected of a Soviet officer. He nodded his head, as was proper, and recited all the propagandist statements required of him in front of his men. But some of what was disseminated he, as a professional soldier, simply could not believe. Soviet propaganda claimed, for instance, that American soldiers were pampered. It was said that each American company had its own cook and that each American soldier had his own sleeping bag, just like a tourist. However, Nekrassov was perfectly well aware (and probably all other Soviet army officers were too) that this could not possibly be true. A company is a military sub-unit meant solely for fighting battles. A company cannot have a cook, for everyone in a company must fight. A regiment needs to have a cook, but only one for 2,000 men. Every night a few infantry soldiers are detailed as fatigues to help him. At least, that is what happens in peacetime; during war, there is absolutely no need for a cook at all.

He did not believe the propaganda and tried to sort out the position for himself. But it seemed, when he compared figures, that the Soviet propaganda might be right after all. A Soviet tank company had thirteen tanks and forty-three men — thirty-nine in the tank crews and four maintenance men, who were responsible for technical upkeep, supplies, discipline, provisions, morale, medical treatment, uniforms, ammunition, and so on. In an American tank company there were seventeen tanks but ninety-two men. What work, Nekrassov wondered, could all these people do? Perhaps they were penal infantry, expendable troops deployed to defend the tanks from light anti-tank weapons. But why keep penal soldiers in tank companies during peacetime? They should be made to do hard labour in prisons during peacetime, and only when war broke out should they be sent out to penal battalions, as wholly expendable manpower.

The figures just did not seem to work out at battalion level. A Soviet tank battalion had forty tanks and 193 men. An American tank battalion had fifty-four tanks but more than 500 men. The staff of a Soviet battalion numbered a total of three, two officers and a sergeant, with a signals platoon of thirteen men. For twenty-four hours a day over a period of many months the battalion’s staff had to cope with directing combat operations and seeing to all the necessary documentation. However, within an American battalion, for some reason or other, they had devised a staff company, which had the same number of men as a whole Soviet battalion. It was completely impossible to understand what all these people could be doing. Moreover, hundreds of vehicles would be needed to transport them all, whereas only thirteen assorted vehicles were used to support a Soviet battalion with forty tanks.

In the Soviet infantry, problems of maintenance were resolved even more simply than in tank sub-units. In a Soviet motor rifle company everyone takes part directly in battle. Its officers are armed with the same weapons as their soldiers. The company sergeant major is responsible for discipline, order and the cleanliness of weapons, and also for supplying the company with everything it needs including fuel, provisions, ammunition, spare parts, uniforms and weapons. But even he, the only man involved in administration, has to take part in the fighting. As soon as the company goes in to fight on foot, the sergeant major either controls the movement of the BTR or directs BMP fire or both. In a Soviet motor rifle battalion there are only thirty men to deal with communications, repairs, medical and technical support, and the supply of stores, provisions and virtually everything else. They also have to deal with all the administration, while the remaining 413 men participate directly in the action. One result of this sensible use of manpower is that a Soviet battalion has a mortar battery, whilst an American battalion twice its size does not. Instead it seemed to have an incredibly long tail of unprotected vehicles full of administrators.

A Soviet motor rifle division of 13,800 men has 272 tanks and 108 self-propelled howitzers. A similar American division has 18,500 men but only 216 tanks and seventy-two self-propelled howitzers. A Soviet division is completely independent, with its own reconnaissance battalion and a company of anti-aircraft missiles (besides the anti-aircraft weapons of the regiments, battalions and companies), whilst an American division has to rely on outside support, in particular on the battalions of hawk air defence missiles.

Andrei Nekrassov simply could not fathom, as he explained to his patient friend, why they did not transfer all their clerks, cooks and supply people to make up new tank battalions, or mortar batteries, or air defence regiments.

In Europe there were altogether 200,000 American soldiers. That would have been sufficient to form fifteen full-bodied Soviet tank or motor rifle divisions and all the auxiliary units and services needed to support and maintain them. If one had to use this manpower to form weaker divisions without, for example, reconnaissance battalions or heavy anti-aircraft missiles, but with 216 tanks per division, this number of men would be sufficient for twenty-five such divisions.

The US Army in Europe, with all that manpower, had only five incomplete divisions. However hard he tried, Nekrassov simply could not understand what work all these other people could be doing. Surely they were not all in penal battalions? His friend Dimitri was equally puzzled.

There were other things that neither Senior Lieutenant could understand. Within the US Army there were sub-units of military police. Why? Could it be that a battalion or regimental commander was unable to establish strict order without outside help? Surely a commander has enough authority to keep his own sub-unit under control?

As far as women were concerned the whole thing was quite incomprehensible. Where can a woman be used in an army? In a hospital or in a signals sub-unit, perhaps, but even then only in places where these were stationary: in rear communications centres and rear hospitals. Where else? In administrative posts? Only two typists were needed in a field army or tank army headquarters. There were five Soviet armies in the German Democratic Republic. That made ten typists in all. No more were needed. Why were there tens of thousands of women in the US Army? What did they do? Was it possible to find some kind of army job which involved only light physical work? What if these women worked in divisions, where, if they were not fighting, divisional personnel had to do extremely heavy work for a minimum of ten hours a day? Could the US Army really have different standards? In a twenty-four-hour period a Soviet soldier had twenty-five minutes of free time. Could this be sufficient for a woman? A soldier must be ready to sleep in the snow with only his greatcoat to cover himself, he may have to wash himself with snow and go for months without hot food. These American women are poor wretches, thought Nekrassov, driven by accursed unemployment into the monstrous hardships of a soldier’s life. This procedure would really have to be changed! But perhaps in the US Army even the men each had a whole hour of free time per day? Perhaps it was true that they all, male and female, had sleeping bags, just like tourists? Perhaps they really did have one cook for every 200 soldiers, and that they took cooks along with them on exercises, and perhaps even to war as well? Perhaps even all the men in the army were allowed a standard of comfort appropriate to their female colleagues?

Naturally, as both young officers well knew, when there were not enough men the Soviet Union used women as well as men in the armed forces. A large part of the fixed air defence sub-units were staffed by women, but these were completely female. Women were also used for other light work. For example, 46 Guards Air Regiment had an entirely female staff. There was a woman commander of the fighter aircraft regiment, a female chief of staff, women pilots, engineers and technicians. But flying and air battles, from a physical point of view, are only light work. No one ever dreamed of sending women to join the Soviet land forces, for the work load there was exceptionally heavy and it was simply impossible to devise some sort of light work. In the Red Army’s land forces there was no work that could be called ‘light’, thought Nekrassov, none at all.

Soviet experts also took a very critical view of the level of combat training of the American forces. The volunteer system had had, it was true, its darker sides. In the days of the draft everyone was called up for military service, but in a zero-draft army many of the volunteer recruits had been society’s failures, unable to make a success of anything else. The system of voluntary service inevitably led to a weakening and a loss of efficiency within the forces. Of course, most Soviet forces were also poorly trained or even sometimes completely untrained, but they had an unquestionable advantage: the barrage battalions of the KGB, which would not allow a Soviet soldier to retreat or to surrender to the enemy. A Soviet soldier had no choice. He must kill his enemies with determination — and quickly — to save his own life. This is an incentive which counter-balances many deficiencies in combat training.

Both Andrei and Dimitri knew, of course, that voluntary service had been abandoned in the United States and had heard that this was for two main reasons. The pay had long been too low to attract any but poor quality volunteers, including men who could not read or write — like so many in the Red Army of course — and many others so dull as to be virtually untrainable. With the highly complex equipment used in the West — far more difficult to handle than the simpler, more rugged things Nekrassov was used to — this mattered much more than it did, for example, in No. 3 Company. The second and more compelling reason for going back to conscript service in the United States had been, it seemed (for reasons they had never fully had explained to them), that under the voluntary system essential reserves of military manpower had simply melted away. If a volunteer system could not produce the very large number of reservists needed in wartime it had to be replaced by conscription. It was as simple as that.

They had been taught that the American soldier was a poor fighter, physically and mentally soft and very apt either to surrender or to run away. Much of this would without any doubt be due to extraordinary weaknesses in American notions of organization and tactical method.

According to Soviet ideas, as both young officers well knew, American tactical method was a compound of criminal negligence, ignorance and incomprehension of the art of war. The US Army, they had been taught, dispersed whatever resources it had more or less evenly along the entire front, with approximately the same proportion of support weapons at each commander’s disposal. However, victory had always been won by concentration, at the right moment, of all resources at a critical point.

All Soviet commanders, from battalions upwards, had a powerful striking tool in their hands. A battalion commander had under command a mortar battery; a regimental commander had a tank battalion, a battalion of self-propelled artillery, an anti-tank company and a battery of multi-barrelled mortars; a divisional commander had a missile battalion, a tank regiment, a self-propelled artillery regiment, a battalion of multi-barrelled rockets and an anti-tank battalion. The higher the level of command the more extensive the resources under the commander’s own hand. The Supreme Commander had enormous powers at his disposal in the units or formations called ‘Reserve of the Supreme High Command’. These were linked to the air corps, breakthrough artillery divisions, special-capacity artillery brigades, anti-tank brigades and sometimes to the tank armies. No commander from the rank of battalion commander upwards dispersed his reserves or distributed his men in equal groups. No subordinate commander had the right to ask for, let alone insist upon, reinforcement or further support.

Every superior commander used his offensive capability as a whole and then only in the critical sector of the battle. A battalion’s mortar battery is not split up among rifle companies, but is used at full strength to support only one company: the most successful one. The anti-tank weapons at the disposal of the commander of a battalion, regiment, division, army or front were never split into groups but always held concentrated. Only at the most crucial moment were they put in, at full strength, at the enemy’s weakest point. The same applied to tanks, artillery and aircraft.

If an army attacked sluggishly, its commander could expect no air support. On the other hand, if an army attacked with determination and energy, it received the support of the entire front air army, including an airborne assault brigade or division, and in addition possibly even further support from an air corps of the Supreme Commander’s Reserve. This policy was not limited only to weapons such as those with nuclear warheads or to air defence missiles. All resources were concentrated in the hands of senior commanders and what was required was filtered down from top to bottom. A divisional commander, for example, had a medical, an engineer and a maintenance battalion plus other support battalions. He did not divide these resources among his regiments, but instead used them all to support the most successful of his regiments. The divisional motor transport battalion would deliver three times the normal ammunition supply to the regiment registering a success, and perhaps none to any other.

Everyone must work to exploit success, at any level. If one army in a front of three had broken through whilst the other two were held up, the front motor transport brigade would bring this army three times as much ammunition as usual, at the expense of the other armies. The front pipeline brigade would lay its pipes right up to the breakthrough zone, ignoring the rest, and all the fuel for the whole front would be given to the most successful army. The front commander would rush all his bridge-building and road-building regiments and brigades to the area of success. If the front commander received, for example, a re-supply of 100 anti-aircraft missiles, all of them would be given to the most successful army.

This sort of concentration of effort on a narrow sector was not impossible, even in a nuclear war. Each Soviet commander had to search out and destroy the enemy’s nuclear weapons with whatever resources he could muster — from missiles and aircraft to saboteurs and secret agents. But first of all any of the enemy’s weapons that might threaten the successful joining together of his various formations would be sought out by the commander and destroyed. An army commander would seek first to destroy any threat that endangered his best division. A front commander concentrated all his forces to search for and destroy those of the enemy’s weapons that might endanger the front’s best army.

All force were directed along one principal axis. The advance must be swift and in separate groups on the principle: ‘move separately, fight together’. The enormous power of the cutting wedge would be mustered suddenly, right at the critical point of the enemy’s defensive positions. The advancing wedge would manoeuvre past the enemy’s pockets of resistance, leaving them hostage. It was very difficult to deliver a nuclear strike on a tank army that had broken through. Its units were agile as quicksilver, manoeuvring between massed groups of enemy forces, bearing down upon large cities but swiftly by-passing them. Assault on NATO forces in Western European cities would always be too risky.

The two young officers knew all this. They had been well taught. They were also well aware of the penalties awaiting those who disregarded what they had been taught.

Any failure within the Red Army to stick to the principle of sudden concentration of forces in one principal direction meant dismissal, and in wartime could mean brief trial followed by execution. They both knew that. In 1941 the Commander of the Western Front Army, General D. G. Pavlov, had been given only eight minutes in which to explain why he had dispersed his forces. His explanations were deemed insufficient and he was shot there and then. His Chief of Staff, General V. E. Klimovsky, had even less time to speak in his own defence and was also immediately shot. Soviet generals knew that the practice of executing failures was still followed. Not four stars on his shoulder straps, not even the diamond insignia of the rank of marshal, could save a failure from paying the final penalty.

In the US Army everything seemed to be quite the opposite. Commanders did not have a strike force at their disposal. The commander of an American battalion did not have a mortar battery, but only a mortar platoon. A brigade commander had absolutely no heavy-fire weapons of his own, and relied on divisional artillery. It was this organizational factor that appeared to compel a divisional commander to divide his artillery amongst his brigades. But shortage of guns was not in itself particularly terrible. What was indefensible was the deliberate policy of dispersing resources. A US divisional commander tried to share out his artillery equally, giving to each brigade as much as to every other. The brigade commander in his turn divided the artillery evenly amongst his battalions. These in turn distributed it to the companies. As a result, the blow to the enemy was never delivered like a punch from a fist, but as though from single poking fingers. American superior commanders also spread their resources in roughly even proportions amongst their divisions. As a result of this, no single commander was able to influence the battle by his own action. He simply did not possess enough of the proper tools himself and could not count, if he had an early success, on their provision.

American experts had attempted to justify this policy as the best defence against the threat of nuclear weapons on massed groups of forces. This came from a purely theoretical understanding of warfare, for it was quite unnecessary to assemble all the artillery in one area for concentrated fire on the major target. The artillery of a whole army could easily be kept under unified control and fire from different points, but its fire must always be concentrated in support of the one division or brigade on which, at that moment, would depend the fate of all other divisions, and perhaps also the fate of the whole operation.

It was always expected of the US Army by Soviet officers that its equipment would be technically very good, if complex, that its air support would be plentiful, and that its ammunition and warlike stores would be abundant. It was also expected that its tactical handling would be inexpert and that its morale would be low.

Those in the Soviet forces who, like the two Senior Lieutenants, expected low morale in the US Army were in for something of a surprise. There had been some quite marked changes in the past few years. The American soldier was far from being the alienated, drug-sodden, pampered pushover that these two and their Soviet brother officers had been led by their own propaganda to expect. Rumours that had reached them, however, suggested that, for whatever reason, the propaganda line about United States troops could be very far from the mark.

Chapter 10: Ireland

Beneath all the sound and fury of the IRA and Mr Paisley in the early 1980s, two or three constructive trends were in fact beginning to appear in Irish affairs. Unification of the whole island had always been the aim and the stated commitment of politicians in the Republic. In this they agreed with the IRA, but they dissociated themselves with varying degrees of emphasis and sincerity from the IRA’s determination to bring this about by force. None of them, however, before Dr Garret FitzGerald in 1981, drew the obvious conclusion that if force was to be ruled out to coerce Northern Ireland into union, persuasion would have to be used instead. He at least pointed his finger clearly and unequivocally at two of the outstanding barriers to union: the claim in the Republic’s constitution that its territory rightly extended over the whole island, and the subordination of the state to the moral and social dictates of the Roman Catholic Church, and hence, among many less contentious consequences, the prohibition of divorce, abortion and birth control. These two clauses encapsulated the objections of northern Protestants to the idea of closer relations with the Republic — the fears of domination by Dublin and the Vatican. Their removal, after much anguish on the part of backwoodsmen of the Republic, made possible at last a less inhibited dialogue on a future in which material interests, and the realities of the world political and strategic scene, could play a greater part than tribal animosity.

The effervescence of ‘loyalist’ feeling from the end of the 1970s onwards had an effect on British opinion which led indirectly in the same direction. The IRA had failed in their attempt to drive the British out of Ulster by terrorism. But the verbal attacks of Ulster-men against the British Government, for not being prepared to make even greater sacrifices on their behalf, finally succeeded where the IRA had failed, in bringing about a mood of general disillusion on the mainland. Why, it was asked, should British lives be lost to preserve the exclusivity of an ungrateful Protestant community as bigoted as their Catholic opponents, and an international frontier which, by its very nature impossible to control, only made it more difficult to overcome terrorism?

This popular mood gave the British Government greater room for manoeuvre in pressing forward with talks and studies jointly carried out with the Government of the Republic. These had begun cautiously but by 1982-3, greatly helped by sympathetic support from the US presidency, swept on with gathering momentum to the solution of trans-frontier problems of trade and energy, and to the grant of real powers to an Anglo-Irish Council, together with the introduction of parliamentary members as participants in this body. Such terms as federalism between north and south continued to be avoided, but the essence of what was in mind was not very different, and the ultimate goal of a confederation of the Isles of the North Atlantic (for which the happy acronym IONA had already been coined), began to glimmer less faintly on the horizon. This would involve a recognition that once the bitterness of the Ulster confrontation was removed or diminished, the present common interests of Ireland and Britain could at last predominate over the hostility of the past, and a subsystem within the European Community could begin to take shape. The Netherlands and Belgium had had their moments of bitterness, and perhaps more competitive economic interests than Britain and Ireland, but this had not prevented them from seeing national interest in the formation of Benelux.

Britain and Ireland started with some advantages: they had had a common monetary unit before the pound and the punt were so unwisely allowed to diverge in 1978. Citizens of the two countries had the unique privilege of voting in each other’s elections (not quite reciprocally until 1983) and they had long anticipated the EEC’s enforcement of free movement of peoples by being able to travel between the two countries without passports. The main requirement for breaking the psychological barrier to confederation was that politicians on all sides should stop peppering their speeches with emotive references to the Norman Conquest, the Battle of the Boyne, 1916 and so on. The upsurge of civil disorder following on the Protestants taking to the streets in 1983 did much in the end to discredit these tired old slogans on either side. The practical needs of security on both sides of the border encouraged both governments, by mutual agreement, increasingly to disregard its existence, and when relative calm returned, the mass of the people were surprised but by no means dismayed to find that some kind of confederal union had de facto come to birth.

There were two incidental clues in this story to foreshadow what came next. It was Isles of the North Atlantic which were moving towards a Benelux type of agreement. This was not an empty geographical expression. The term North Atlantic carried unmistakable echoes of the fact that thirty-four years earlier a group of countries had come together under that very name to express in the treaty that gave birth to NATO their common interest in resisting external threat. The group extended beyond the islands of the North Atlantic ocean to include countries on its continental coasts — Belgium, Federal Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, France (which remained bound to the Alliance even when in 1966 it left the Organization), Spain (which joined later), some countries (Greece, Italy, Turkey) which had no Atlantic coastline but shared the defensive interests of those who had, and above all, the lynchpin of the Alliance, the United States.

The need to restore internal security had now become a further powerful motive to express in concrete form the common interests, within the Atlantic Community, of IONA. It did not require a great leap of the imagination to see that external threat could easily feed on internal disorder; indeed there was good reason to think that Irish terrorists had received aid from various potentially hostile sources in addition to what they were given by misguided Irish-Americans.

An unconnected circumstance pushed coincidentally in the same direction. When the European Community at last agreed on a fisheries policy it became necessary for this to be enforced throughout the maritime economic zone surrounding Community countries and extending to 200 miles from their coasts. The prospective admission into the Community of Spain and Portugal with their activity and expertise in distant deep-sea fishing reinforced the requirement. A glance at the map is enough to show that a very large area of this common maritime zone in the Atlantic is defined by reference to the coast of Ireland and can most easily be supervised by vessels and aircraft operating from its territory. It was equally clear that Irish military resources were inadequate to meet this requirement, and, with some nationalistic misgiving, it became necessary to accept that the ships and aircraft of other Community countries should help to police the operational area, and should in some cases be stationed on Irish territory. All this helped to break down the historical Irish reservation about becoming involved in a common effort for defence. The extension of political co-operation in the European Community from foreign policy to security policy, begun under the British presidency in 1981, had accustomed Irish representatives to taking part in discussion of matters relating closely to the Atlantic Alliance, and enabled them to learn what the others knew about the Soviet military build-up, and the increasingly dangerous situation arising from Soviet opportunism round the world and from the deepening concern of Soviet leaders facing rebellious subjects in Eastern Europe.

All these strands seemed to lead almost insensibly towards the goal so long desired by Western strategic planners: Ireland’s recognition that it is of, and not only in, the West, and that some practical consequences could now be drawn from this recognition. To begin with there was no need even for formal alliance. It was enough to agree that the forces of friendly countries participating in the policing of the maritime zone should be authorized to take such steps as were necessary to protect themselves and their shore installations against any possible threat. Then, as the international situation deteriorated and the risk of hostilities grew more acute, the fishery protection ships could be replaced by anti-submarine naval vessels and maritime reconnaissance aircraft augmented by such further air support as was necessary.

For an account, from a rather different angle and from an Irish pen, of how events moved in the last few years before the war we are privileged to reprint here an article entitled ‘The Irish Dimension’ from the all too short-lived literary and historical periodical The Wexford Pirate (its first and last edition, in fact) published in June 1986.

It has been said that in Ireland what is self-evident has quite often in the past been stubbornly denied if politics, prejudice or the faith found it inconvenient. Irish insistence on neutrality furnished a case in point. Its futility had long been clear. It was only the problem of the north which, under all three of these counts, had prevented general acknowledgement in the Republic of something so obvious to the world outside.

After the establishment of the Anglo-Irish Inter-Governmental Council in 1981, and a series of firm but friendly interventions by the US Administration, the regular semi-private meetings between the Irish Taoiseach and the British Prime Minister became more important, even if they also sometimes became less bland.

One such meeting in 1983 was billed in the press as having touched on two subjects almost always avoided, the so-called ‘British army of occupation’, and ‘the possibilities of eventual confederation’.

The two leaders did not find themselves all that far apart. The Times-Guardian reported on the first subject:

The Taoiseach said that British soldiers in Ulster, though carrying out a well-nigh impossible job with great courage and such tact as they could muster, were regarded as an army of occupation even by moderate Catholics who ought to know better. That is to say, youngsters threw stones at British soldiers in the belief that they were thereby ‘demonstrating for Ireland’, whatever was meant by that, and unfortunately even middle-class Catholic fathers did not disabuse them.

The troops’ presence was preventing a Catholic massacre. Their task would be easier, however, if they were not operating under the flag of Britain, a country against which old Catholic animosities continued to smoulder and were all too easily fanned into flame.

According to the report, the British Prime Minister said that she warmly agreed. Although the task could hardly be handed to United Nations peacekeeping forces (the parading of Indian or Nigerian troops down the Falls Road might cause more problems than it solved), it would be most welcome if this dangerous, thankless and costly job could eventually pass to NATO or EEC forces, including, after an interval, even some Irish troops. But this would be easier if Ireland had some association with NATO, and if NATO could come to regard ‘this fight of all free Irishmen, against Soviet-armed and communist-financed murderers’, as, if not actually something of a NATO obligation, at least as a matter of pressing interest to NATO.

The Taoiseach was reported to have said that he took at least the first of these points, and intended to do something about it.

Shortly afterwards an arrangement was arrived at which neatly sidestepped public repugnance in Eire at official alliance with Britain, by the use of Ireland’s ancient connection with another traditional enemy of England — France. A bilateral defence agreement was made between the Irish and French republics, under the benevolent gaze of NATO, which provided for the stationing of Irish troops overseas, in the joint defensive interests of both, under French command. Poets heard the beating of the wings of wild geese in the night. The ghost of Marechal McMahon smiled, and many another. An Irish Brigade would serve with the French again, as others had served three centuries ago.

The Federal Republic positively welcomed the location of an Irish contingent in southern Germany, provided someone else accepted the stationing costs. Eire itself could not — that was obvious. In the event, as might have been expected, the United States picked up the tab, and in the spring of 1984 an Irish brigade group moved into hastily erected but good barrack accommodation, under command of II French Corps, in the neighbourhood of Trier.

It consisted of a brigade group headquarters and three mobile battalions, a field artillery regiment, an anti-aircraft artillery regiment and reconnaissance squadron, with engineer, ordnance and supply companies, all in a highly satisfactory state of training. Its commander was a promising young one-star general with considerable experience in UN peacekeeping, supported by a hand-picked staff, many of whom (like the commander) had the advantage of professional training in British defence establishments. For, of course, however far apart the Irish Government felt obliged to keep from Britain, out of deference to the deeply rooted animosities of earlier generations and to Irish-American opinion, in which long out-dated attitudes still thrived, Irish defence leant quite heavily on British support, freely given with an unostentatious friendliness which made it doubly welcome. There also now duly appeared in Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe a modest Irish increment to the considerable liaison staff maintained there under a major-general by the French, non-membership of NATO notwithstanding. The whole arrangement was one which suited everybody who faced the facts of life in Eire’s relations with the outer world as they really were, and not as they were imagined to be.

Irish neutrality in a major East-West conflict, however loudly trumpeted by successive Taoiseachs, had never in fact been a starter. Eamonn de Valera had once roundly declared that the defence of the British Isles was one. It was abundantly clear at the turn of the 1970s that the only way to avoid the direct involvement of Ireland in a world war, given that island’s geographical position, would be to tow it away and anchor it somewhere else.

Even before the London New Statesman disclosed in early 1981 that critical installations and other facilities in the Republic had almost certainly been targeted for attack by both sides it was perfectly clear that they would play a very important part in a war between the Atlantic Alliance and the Warsaw Pact.

The use of Shannon and west coast sites was vital for maritime operations in the Atlantic; availability of the Irish airfields and ports was essential for the successful operation of the Atlantic ‘air bridge’ reinforcement operations into France and Britain for the European front; and the deployment of mobile radar and other surveillance systems would give much needed depth to NATO’s air defence against Soviet attack, by sea or air, from the West.

To be quite blunt about it, if these facilities were not used by consent they would be seized. Otherwise they would be destroyed, if not by one side then by the other, to deny their use to the enemy. Sir John Junor, one of the most honest and outspoken commentators in the journalism of these offshore islands, made no bones about it. ‘In an East-West war,’ he wrote in London’s Sunday Express in June 1983, ‘a declaration of Irish neutrality would afford about as much protection as a fig leaf in Antarctica.’

On the second subject, the future association of component parts of the British Isles, the Times-Guardian reported:

The two prime ministers agreed that the ideal eventual solution would be a confederation or federation of Ireland, maybe indeed eventually leading to some confederation of all territories in the British Isles.

The Taoiseach said he had taken great political risks to make this more readily attainable. Ireland’s constitution had been changed so that it was now a secular instead of a Catholic state. Divorce, contraception, abortion, secular education and dual citizenship in provinces that became in any way integrated into an Irish confederation or federation were all now accepted.

Could not the British Prime Minister for her part now take some political risks also? He recognised that she could not formally break her promise that there would be no change in Northern Ireland’s status until a majority in the north agreed. But could she not take the line that those who stirred up hatred against the Catholics in the north were breaking the law under British race-discrimination legislation? And could not British political parties start indicating their support for moderate candidates in Ulster parliamentary elections?

If there could be one breakthrough whereby any constituency in the north elected a reasonable person ready to consider confederation, instead of always electing either Protestant bigots or rabid Republicans, people who longed for peace could start to hope.

The British Prime Minister agreed with the Taoiseach’s views on general lines, but said direct intervention by herself would only be counterproductive. If she indicated support for a moderate candidate in any election, both sects of the Northern Irish would swing all the more violently to their usual support of the most extreme candidate available.

Someday special circumstances might arise in some election, and she would seize the chance to try to get other politicians in other British parties to act responsibly with her on the moderates’ side. She had already turned her back on any coalition with the extreme Ulster Unionists in the British parliament, although Callaghan when in office, and Foot in opposition, had behaved badly about this. She would look for an opportunity to do more.

The opportunity arose because of the Christmas shopping bombs in 1983, and because of the emergence of that most unexpected of all Irish folk heroes, the 24-year-old Patrick McBride.

In early December of 1983, a bomb exploded amid shopping crowds in London’s Oxford Street, killing eighty-three people, including a store Santa Claus and seventeen handicapped children who were queuing to get free presents from him. The so-called Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), claiming ‘responsibility’ for these hideous crimes, declared that this was a justified attack upon a double military objective. The stores group had as a non-executive part-time member of its board a former General Officer Commanding in Northern Ireland and the INLA had^; understood (wrongly, as had to be admitted later) that the Santa Claus was a retired regimental sergeant major from the Irish Guards. Two days later bombs exploded in a shopping centre in Dublin, killing thirty-two. A Protestant para-military group called the ‘Battlers of the Boyne’ said that loyalist Ulster was striking back in the heartland of popery. Several more bombs went off in both Protestant and Catholic pubs in Northern Ireland, and, with appalling results, five in separate sectarian schools.

The British Special Branch took a keen interest in certain unusual features of the Oxford Street and Dublin bombs, although the Belfast ones were of the usual home-grown sort made in local factories, against which London and Dublin had by now rather sophisticated detection devices. The usual leakiness of Irish terrorist sources in London enabled the Special Branch to catch those who planted the Oxford Street bomb fairly early, and some interesting developments followed. Police in Eire and the Province carried out dawn raids on the headquarters of several extreme Catholic and Unionist groups. Communiques that evening explained why.

The materials for the Oxford Street bomb had been picked up by those who had planted it from a rendezvous in London, where they had been cached by a group of German students now known to be members of the reconstituted Baader-Meinhof gang. The materials for the Dublin bombs were similar, but had apparently been brought in from Italy by a party from the still very active Red Brigades. Raids on the extremist Catholic and Protestant political groups had produced clear evidence that people in each of those headquarters knew what was happening, and had in fact drawn a good deal of personal money as well as weapons and explosives from sources known to enjoy Soviet support. ‘Although most people in each group thought they were fighting each other,’ ran the joint communique from the British and Irish heads of government, ‘these outrages have been financed and organized by agencies very close to the Soviet Union, clearly with interests other than those of Ireland in mind.’

Nobody could with certainty define which Catholic and Protestant extremists had been paid traitors to the West, and which had been merely megalomaniac nationalists, but fairly strong fingers of suspicion were pointed at two people who happened to be in the news at this time. A parliamentary by-election was pending in the marginal (for Northern Ireland) constituency of mid-Ulster, and a lady Catholic extremist and a gaunt, outrageous Protestant demagogue were already the main candidates in the field. Up to now it had been assumed that these two malign people would share 90 per cent of mid-Ulster’s votes. The central parties (the Moderate Catholic, Non-Sectarian Alliance and so on) by now usually put up a joint candidate, but he or she rarely polled more than 10 per cent. After the killing of those seventeen handicapped children, the centrist parties hoped they might get more than 10 per cent of the vote in mid-Ulster, provided the right candidate for them could somehow be found.

He emerged in the most dramatic way at 4 pm the next Saturday afternoon, with bloodstained headband and three broken ribs, pounding down through the middle of the Twickenham Rugby Union football ground, with every Irish televiewer north or south cheering him along at every step.

Diminishing shamateurism and increasing sponsorship had brought it about that this winter saw the first Rugby Union World Cup, with teams from all four home countries of the British Isles and all the old dominions, plus France, Argentina, the United States, Romania and the Netherlands. From the top half of the draw the runaway entrants to the final were the powerful All Blacks of New Zealand; from the bottom half a green surprise packet from Ireland, made up, as always, of players from any part of the island, north and south.

With injury time already started in the final half, New Zealand led 28–23, and their ferocious forwards pressed once more on the Irish line. Ireland’s gentle giant redhead Pat McBride, lock forward and captain and fiftyfold hero already that day, fell yet again upon the ball. He emerged from the scrummage with forehead bleeding, kicking for touch. A brief bandaging. ‘Feet Ireland’ from the line out. A loose maul. A heel and a Garry Owen forward punt. The New Zealand full-back fielded it just inside his 22-metre line, sidestepped the onrushing Irish forwards to his left, and went to kick to the right as Pat McBride, and he alone, had anticipated. The New Zealander’s boot, the ball, and the front of Pat McBride’s ample torso occupied the same space at the same instant, with a sickeningly audible cracking of McBride’s ribs. But the ball was clutched to that green jersey regardless. McBride was past the full-back now, loping with dragging right foot the last 20 metres to the line like a wounded hare. Before two million television sets from Cork to Belfast all Ireland rose to its feet as he dived (no, actually flew)[4] the last eight metres to land between the posts. The conversion was a formality and Ireland had won the World Cup 29–28.

At the many TV interviews afterwards McBride developed a fine strain of Irish blarney, which was just what his country needed at this moment of shopping-centre tragedy and showplace triumph. As the winning team had been half from his north and half from the south, and ‘one-third Catholic, one-third Protestant, one-third heathen, all in old Ireland’s green’, McBride said that he himself felt Northern Irish nationalism for one day a year only, which was when he rallied his club side in Ballymena for the annual match against Sean O’Driscoll’s Cork. After that match, when it was in Belfast, he preferred to drink in Sean’s brother’s pub in Andersonstown rather than bomb it. As for those who blew up schools in the name of the Christian religion, in any of its forms, ‘or those who for one instant give any votes or sympathy or shelter or offer weasel words of partial excuse for any of these child murderers, whether from UDA or IRA or anyone else, my whole team would like to have each one of them for two, or better three, minutes under an All Black scrum’ (here the team burst into applause behind him) ‘and for that scrum I would nominate…’ (here he named the toughest eggs from the tournament, including three from Australia, a Welshman and an Afrikaner who had been sent off during it). ‘Ireland means this,’ declared McBride, holding aloft the World Cup, ‘it does not mean the bombers.’

There were some nasty funerals after that month’s bombings, including one where the IRA declared a military burial for a thirteen-year-old who had belonged to one of their brigades. The boy’s parents declared that they wanted no such thing, and wished the ‘antagonisms between our neighbouring communities to be buried with our poor Michael’. As the saintly local priest invited some notables from the Protestant community to come to the funeral, there was likely to be a trial of strength. The TV cameras gathered like jackals.

The cameras showed that Pat McBride, still hobbling on a stick, was one of the party with the parents; so were some other members from the victorious national team, for the father was connected with a local rugby club. At the graveyard six masked IRA men appeared as if from nowhere, and raised rifles to fire a salute. Pat McBride hobbled over to the nearest gunman, struck his hand with his stick and caused him to drop the rifle, which later proved to be loaded only with blanks. The other rugby players disarmed and unmasked the other five gunmen. The unmasked gunman wriggling in McBride’s huge hand was held before the TV cameras. He was a frightened teenage boy. McBride gently kicked his backside and said ‘now take your beastly mania away’. In TV interviews afterwards McBride launched his main attack not on ‘these posturing but actually unarmed children’. He said the most disgusting news of the day was a speech against all Catholics by the Protestant extremist at the mid-Ulster by-election.

The next day McBride was asked to stand as the centrist candidate at mid-Ulster. He accepted, and said he would call himself a candidate for ‘confederacy’. During his campaign he was supported by the British Prime Minister and the leader of the other three mainland British parties, and also by the three main parties in the Republic of Ireland. Unprecedentedly, he received a telegram of support from the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, and then on the last day another from the Pope.

It would be splendid to be able to report that McBride therefore won the seat. Because this was Northern Ireland he came merely second, 2 per cent behind the Protestant extremist and 8 per cent in front of the Catholic lady, who made a rather good speech in defeat. ‘If there were a proportional, transferable or alternative voting system,’ she said, ‘all my supporters would have switched on second ballot to Pat McBride, who is a Protestant we respect. We should then have had an MP here who was liked by most of the people, instead of this Paisleyite who is detested by 63 per cent of them.’

This was significant. Way back in 1973 the Ulster Assembly that led to the brief Sunningdale agreement on power-sharing was elected under a system of transferable voting. It has been agreed that the new and long delayed constitutional assembly in Northern Ireland will also be elected under this system.

In 1987 public opinion polls suggest that in Northern Ireland the centrist parties (including the Confederate Party) hold a sufficient block of votes in the majority of constituencies to force the counting of the second votes. If that happens, nearly all the second votes will go to the centrist parties, and there is now a real prospect that the elected majority in Northern Ireland will vote in 1988 to get Britain off the hook of its 1973 declaration that there can be no change in Northern Ireland’s constitutional status unless a majority of its inhabitants concur. A majority of its elected representatives will probably vote for a confederate Ireland.

This is a far more peaceful outcome in Ulster than appeared conceivable even as late as 1982. It is not uncharacteristic that as the world seemed threatened by incineration through thermonuclear war Ireland was moving at last towards internal peace.

We must now leave the thoughtful and lively prose of the sadly defunct Pirate and pass on to consideration of the impact of Irish belligerence, deepening in successive stages of association with other allies, including the United Kingdom, upon the war in the air and at sea which erupted in August 1985.

It had to be acknowledged that the happy outcome of Ireland’s afflictions had not, by the spring of 1985, been perceived in Whitehall as so certain as to justify rejoicing; but it was decided, in a spirit of optimism, to develop plans for utilizing to the best advantage the air bases and harbours which might in consequence become available.

Even so, there were those who believed, as a letter to the Times-Guardian of 28 December 1984 pointed out, that ‘simply redrawing the existing border so as to make the Irish Republic conterminous with the island of Ireland will just exchange a situation in which up to half a million people feel that they are in the wrong country for one in which at least double that number feel so’.

Ever since the formation of the Atlantic Alliance it had been possible to count upon the use of naval and air bases in Northern Ireland, and the readiness of the people there to support the British war effort, despite the existence of Republican sentiment in some parts of the Catholic community. These bases were of vital importance. First of all, without them it would be much more difficult to safeguard the approaches to the Clyde submarine base. It was in these waters that Soviet electronic surveillance vessels, taking advantage of Britain’s retention of a three-mile limit of territorial waters, had persistently maintained watch over the comings and goings of both the British and the American ballistic missile and fleet submarines. From time to time, also, intrusive submarines, known not to be Allied, had been detected in the Clyde approaches. In times of international tension, or if war should break out, intensive operations using Northern Irish bases would be required. Secondly, the already daunting task of safeguarding shipping in the North Atlantic would be rendered even more so by the loss of these bases, especially the airfields. Hence the Defence Staff insisted that any all-Ireland constitutional agreement must include the retention of NATO’s use of the Northern Ireland bases as required.

As to Eire, it was ideally placed to command the Western Approaches to the Channel, and to strengthen the defence of shipping in the Eastern Atlantic. But its naval and air forces consisted of six patrol vessels, only two of which had helicopters, and a dozen or so light aircraft; there was no military infrastructure capable of handling even the most elementary naval/air operations; and there were no coastal surveillance radars, let alone gun or missile defences. Nor was there any reserve of trained people to man operations rooms, communications networks, or even look-out stations. Fortunately advantage could be taken of the universality of air traffic control procedures, and the wide range of facilities at an international airport, to make operational use of Shannon immediately war broke out. Plans were made, also, to include the whole of Ireland and its territorial waters in the ‘extended air-sea defence zone’ under the newly-established Joint Allied Command Western Approaches (JACWA). Its Commander-in-Chief was British, equal in status with the Supreme Allied Commanders Europe and Atlantic (both American), and his area of responsibility incorporated Channel Command, and that part of the Eastern Atlantic which fell within the UK air defence zone and included all waters over the Continental Shelf.

Following the Franco-Irish special entente in 1983 the Ministry of Defence in Paris sought Dublin’s agreement to the occasional deployment of one or two maritime patrol aircraft of the Aeronavale (French Naval Air Arm) to Shannon to facilitate their operation in peacetime out in the Atlantic. The twin-engined Atlantique was a very capable and well-tried aircraft and the latest version (Atlantique Nouvelle Generation, or ANG) with which the Flotilles at Lann-Bihouie in Brittany were now equipped was an excellent antisubmarine aircraft which also had a limited anti-ship capability. But compared with its four-engined counterparts (the US Navy’s Orion and the RAF Nimrod) it was just a little short on range and endurance. The lengthening of its sea-legs by working from the west of Ireland would enhance its use in many of its peacetime tasks and, although this was not the basis of the French request, it would be a real ‘force multiplier’ in war.

Irish agreement was gracefully forthcoming provided that advance notice was given (save of course in emergency) and an agreed quota of visits per year was not exceeded. To these stipulations France readily agreed and a system of liaison officers and communications teams was established with Ireland as it had been for several years with the United Kingdom.

The Soviet naval staff were keenly aware of the strategic importance of Eire in any future battle in the Atlantic. Soviet policy was directed urgently to the denial to NATO of the use of air and naval bases there, and of the use of Irish ports and tanker terminals for trans-shipment. It was too much to hope, perhaps, that Irish bases could be made available to Soviet forces, but as a long-term aim it was borne in mind.

It was not the Naval Correspondent of The Times, but merely ‘Our Correspondent in Dublin’, who reported on 12 December 1981 ‘an application from the Russian airline Aeroflot to operate regular passenger services into Shannon… Last year the airport authority built a special fuel depot to enable Russian and other Eastern European airlines to refuel there. Russian tankers deliver the oil directly to Shannon… The inauguration of an Aeroflot service would be welcomed by the IRA which has won consistent moral support from the Russians for their terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland.’ It was therefore with considerable chagrin that the Soviet naval planners learned of the sequence of events by which the Republic of Ireland gradually became committed to a degree of support for the NATO cause. But, as the strength of the Soviet Navy and its Air Force increased, and the prospect of breaking down the Atlantic ‘air bridge’ improved accordingly, the neutralization of Ireland by military means became part of Soviet war plans.

These plans had not, however, fully matured when the Soviet aircraft carrier Kiev, escorted by two Krivak-class frigates, arrived in Cork on 27 July 1985. The group was said to be on a training cruise which would take it to West Africa and Cuba. It had, of course, been tracked by NATO surveillance forces since leaving its home waters in Murmansk and in the normal course of events it would have remained under routine surveillance as it resumed its way south-west on 2 August. For various reasons, however, contact with the Kiev group was lost during the night of 3 August.

Early on 5 August, JACWA received a garbled and delayed report of a very large oil tanker damaged and on fire in Bantry Bay. She had struck a mine. Later that day reports came in of an Irish patrol vessel sunk off Cork, the Fishguard to Rosslare ferry sunk near Wexford, and a Dutch coaster sunk in the approaches to Dublin.

Not until after the war was it learned that while the Soviet aircraft carrier and her escorts had been visiting Cork a comprehensive mine-laying operation was being carried out by six Soviet Foxtrot-class (conventional) submarines. They laid delayed-action mines off Lough Swilly, Bantry Bay, Cork, Wexford, Dublin and Milford Haven, which sank five ships. Only Milford Haven was cleared of mines before a casualty occurred. The shortage of mine counter-measure vessels at JACWA’s disposal resulted in the majority of Britain’s western ports being closed to shipping for several days at a most critical time. Only one of the Soviet Foxtrots was sunk, No. 132, which attempted to withdraw through the North Channel after laying mines off Dublin. Her snort mast was detected by a surveillance radar very recently mounted on the Mull of Kintyre, and Sea King helicopters from Prestwick were actually in sonar contact with the Foxtrot when they received orders, early on 4 August, to commence hostilities against the Soviet Union. It was particularly heartening to the helicopter squadron that the first attack with the new Stingray torpedoes was successful.

Given the excellent liaison already established at Shannon between the French naval airmen and the Irish airport authorities, the arrival there on 4 August, within hours of the outbreak of war in Europe, of four ANG caused little stir. Nor did the landing, shortly afterwards, of a US Navy Orion. This aircraft had been following up a submarine contact some 100 miles south of Cape Farewell, which had been obtained by a Canadian frigate using a towed array passive sonar. Unfortunately the scent had gone cold, and the aircraft was ordered into Shannon, to operate under the Commander, Maritime Air, Eastern Atlantic.

On the morning of 5 August the Orion and two ANG were allotted tasks that took them far out into the Atlantic. Amidst the excitement of that day’s news this did not attract much attention. But what did cause a loud buzz of rumour and speculation in the Shannon communications centre and control tower was when, at 1722 hours, a distinctly French voice came over the loudspeakers monitoring the international distress frequency: ‘MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY’ it called, ‘THIS IS SIERRA QUEBEC BRAVO CHARLIE WE ARE BEING ATTACKED BY FIGHTERS LATITUDE 52.12 NORTH LONGITUDE…’

Here, as in many places all over Europe, the outbreak of war was signified not by any dramatic public announcement like Chamberlain’s address to the British people forty-six years earlier, but by a series of swift and violent encounters.

In this instance, the response was immediate and well orchestrated for the Mayday signal could mean only one thing: a Kiev — class carrier was out to the west and it must be found and sunk before it did any more damage. The two remaining ANG at Shannon and two Nimrods from an RAF base in Cornwall were launched on a search within half an hour. As the ANG climbed out on their search tracks the crews could see smoke rising from the refinery and the main hangars at Shannon and guessed correctly that a salvo of air-launched missiles, probably from a Backfire, had found their mark.

The search area was very large because of the missing and all-important longitude figure, but a fast westbound merchant ship broke wireless silence to report sighting a Forger aircraft on the horizon and this clue shrank the area of probability dramatically. With a new datum to work from, dawn was breaking when a Nimrod picked up the Kiev and its escorts on its radar.

At JACWA headquarters the operations staff were looking disconsolately at their meagre forces for attacking the enemy group. The specialized anti-shipping Buccaneers that had survived a raid on Murmansk the day before were being held at Bodo, Norway, to guard against Soviet naval incursions along that coast and they could muster only two or three aircraft from the UK. These would need in-flight fuelling and a fighter escort against the carrier. It could hardly be called a balanced force. But help came unexpectedly in the shape of fourteen Marineflieger (Federal German Naval Air Force) Tornados which arrived at Kinloss air base in Scotland as the planners were puzzling over the problem. This force, thanks to the decisiveness of its commander, Captain Manfred Steinhof, had got away from Nordholz in Schleswig-Holstein under the very noses of the advancing Soviets.

By 0900 hours, and after the French Ministry of Defence had got Irish agreement for the Marineflieger aircraft to refuel at Shannon despite the previous day’s damage, eight of the Tornados landed and refuelled. They were in the air again in half an hour to join their fighter escort of RAF Tornados backed up by a VC-10 tanker. A United States Navy Orion had by then taken over the shadowing of the Kiev force on its radar and it homed the Tornados in for the attack. The carrier was holed with her steering disabled and one of her escorts badly damaged as the force withdrew and the submarine Splendid arrived on the scene to despatch the stricken ships. Three Tornados were lost, one to a Forger and the others to missiles from the escorts. Manfred Steinhof’s aircraft ran out of fuel short of the Irish coast but he and his navigator were picked up by a fishing boat. The Third World War had broken out thirty-seven hours earlier, and this was just one action in the great tide of war that was engulfing Europe.